case study / 09 / 3d / data
Local Stellar Neighborhood
2.5 million real stars in a browser, drawn from the AT-HYG catalog. Drag to orbit. Star colors come from B-V index values, not vibes.
Loading 2.5M points the obvious way kills your frame budget. The trick is packing positions into one Float32Array, colors into a Uint8Array, and feeding both to one draw call.
Catalog data lives on Codeberg with Git LFS. A prepare script resolves pointers, downloads gzipped parts, and writes a compact binary the client can stream.