Lantern
A night-sky study in WebGL — nine thousand stars from an open catalogue, drawn in real time and coloured by temperature.
Lantern started at a hackathon and refused to stay finished. It renders every naked-eye star from an open catalogue, positioned for wherever and whenever you are, with each star’s colour taken from its measured temperature.
Why
Most sky apps are built to identify. This one is built to look — no labels until you ask, slow drift, and a dimmed red mode that keeps your night vision intact.
Making it
The stars are a single draw call: points in a vertex buffer, sized and coloured in the shader. The hardest part was not performance but restraint — deciding how little to show.
Darkness is the material. The stars are only the punctuation.