Árstraumur

About

An artist site for ambient music, built on real astronomy. It opens on a street in Gävle, Sweden, and one unbroken camera move lifts you off the rooftops and out to Earth. From there the solar system is the navigation: every section of the site parks at another planet. Almost nothing is faked. The planets run a VSOP87 ephemeris in the browser (astronomy-engine), so they sit where they actually are at the moment you load the page, and the light comes from the real sun: city lights on the night side fade in past civil twilight rather than at the geometric terminator. The stars are the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, the ISS follows its live orbit, and Gävle is Lantmäteriet's 0.16 m orthophoto laid over OpenStreetMap building footprints. The weather in the opening descent is the real weather here right now. Leave the mouse alone for two minutes and the camera lets go and tours the system on its own. Built with three.js 0.180, TypeScript and Vite, with hand written GLSL for the atmosphere, the sun, the sky and the post chain. No framework. Every colour texture is KTX2 / Basis ETC1S, which took GPU texture memory from about 993 MB to 202 MB on desktop and 183 MB to 44 MB on phones, with the download essentially unchanged.

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