I was avoiding mentioning oxbow lakes for one of his future posts to not be that guy but unlike simulating the dynamo for aurora it may actually work in terms of gameplay lol

This detail wouldn’t add much to the game but if you stick with the “wedge taken from the earth” look like when you zoom out here, it’d be really funny if the wedge glowed with a color temperature. Obv only if there’s minimal perf cost lol

THE PHASE LOCKED It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working

(Almost) NONE of these objects are in the Simbad catalog! What a treasure trove. 128x128px, TESS sector 19, cam1, ccd1.
#astronomy

I did a little digging with that variable star, and I think it’s a constant binary! It has a very strong resonant frequency across the whole image, so I wonder if I can extract the PSF from this alone

#astronomy

I think TESS’s pulsar calibration has some precision issues. There’s significant subpixel drift in this test crop. But interestingly, we’ve got asteroids now :)

I’m shocked at the number of variable stars in this tiny 64x64 section. I wonder if it’s like this everywhere?

#astronomy

spectral volumes sure are *weird*.

This is 32 frames of filtered TESS video, with a spatial blue noise filter (airy disc) and each image is accumulated via a sinc window. Each frame is a unique temporal frequency. Complex phase is hue.

I think the waves are asteroids? They're plane slices!

True / LIES makes for a great substitute with very funny syntax

if(condition == LIES) {…}

I’ve got a problem though and I can’t quite figure out how to get around it. I want to share videos, but the noise nukes quality in every video encode I try. Does anyone here know of some good denoising algorithms I can try from either of these realms? I’m pretty alien to denoising in both.

Psuedospectral Fourier transform applied to time only per-pixel of Tess sector 4, Camera 1, ccd4. Plotted complex phase as hue, tonemapped luminance. Asteroids are visible as rainbow streaks, variable stars have a color. ~400 images used for a total exposure of ~1 week.

Lomb-Scargle Periodogram applied via a Psuedospectral Fourier transform on time only per-pixel of Tess sector 4, Camera 1, ccd4. I believe this is the same slice as image 1, but with real LS instead of complex phase. Asteroids are visible as streaks. There are two gaps in the dataset associated with the earth getting in view of the camera, and data downlink. Both are visible in asteroid trails. The tile pattern is a failure of my algorithm to handle a lens flare.

Zoom in on a color test with the full two week dataset from image 1. Note the strange asteroid trajectory and gaps. I suspect this is a lens distortion artifact, which greatly complicates processing. It feels surprisingly similar to working with distorted normal maps!

Holy shit I finally got this #astronomy project with #gamedev tech working at a semi reasonable speed. 40 minutes per sector sure beats 4 days! Still not happy with it. Astropy is slow. SCIPY is slow. Nothing in this realm has a hint of systems programming and there’s SO much headroom for more.

I’ve been doing exactly this with astronomy lately! It feels like peering into a parallel world of precision over speed. They have some really cool tools that are begging to be accelerated, like thin-plate splines or sigma clipping. TPS feels a wee bit like radiance caching. It’s super neat!

Facebook is bizarre. It’s the first entity I’ve seen that late stage enshittified. From what I remember, their strategy was: if you didn’t *constantly pay more* you got deranked in the algorithm. Even for advertising. Insane anti social behavior for both consumers and advertisers

Thin plate RBF spline, taken from https://shape.polymtl.ca/lombaert/thinplates/

After profiling the first step, the primary perf hog (~30s per frame) is something called a “Thin-Plate RBF spline.” I don’t think we have anything like this in #graphics or #gamedev …but we should. It feels a little like irradiance caching. Maybe radiance cascades could be handy here? #astronomy

That one is a wee bit of a fib because I only transfer the data once. I’m assuming I can parallelize transfers while a compute job is going for said test. If anything, it’s the upper limit of what this simple code can do.

The streams are a command queue vs requesting each kernel individually

2048x2048 convolution with a 32x32 kernel performance comparisons. Time is log scaled.

#Astronomy feels SO much like peeking into a parallel world from #gamedev. Its fascinating. Its like if we only did pixel shaders for decades with color only, no normals

Tested a 2048x2048 image convolved with a 32x32 kernel. Literally a bloom shader lol, ~500fps

Gonna blow some minds with this

Since each generation is 15 years apart, by extrapolation, 21 will be funny again in 2371

I was finally given an astronomy research task, the first of which is to install something called "Topcat"

Oh my god hello again web 1.0

I wonder how much room there is to transfer the last 20 years of graphics tech into this field. Java's a bit of an odd choice nowadays
#astronomy

Are these GA Rotors? It almost has the exact half angle rotations we see in that realm, but in this case both sides are positive? Weird, but neat!

This all ignores Elon’s dark descent since buying twitter. He’s gone fascist, abandoned his companies, and turned twitter into 4chan’s worst boards. His mission went down the drain of that sink he let in

The fucking “@grok put a one-piece bikini on it made of thin strips of fabric” shit is so god damn antisocial it feels like a Facebook feature. We all know how that went. Shocked any artist remains there. What a disgrace to any artist to ask grok to pave over labor with corporate slop

I was debating cross posting to the dead bird site for engagement. Every time I go there all I see are cool research papers!

But then I scrolled a little further and between the research there’s “yeah, we SHOULD kill the Jews” and in every art reply there’s ai generated CP and

Yeah I’m good.

Do people usually not importance sample the human luminance sensitivity spectra and treat the rest as procedural color? I’ve done that to great success for visualizing relativistic blackbodies but maybe I had the precise niche where that worked well

Man I’m having such a shitty 2026 so far.

• my nose was kinda itchy earlier

God it hasn’t been my year. Can’t wait for 2027

Whoops!! I forgot to share the results! It still has a few odd rendering bugs, this is a Kerr black hole. Runs in real time with my modified Kerr metric using a normal vector parameterization. Still couldn't squash the horizon reflections, but the frame dragging is super visible now!

I’ve always been a fan of ml papers that rip out as much of the ML as they can. No magic parameters, no stolen data, and it’s often fast enough for games. Gaussian Splats and Plenoxels are excellent examples for graphics. I feel a form of GS would make for stellar screenspace imposters

Monday rhymes with book

Imagine if all of OOT was like that, in first person, like they originally planned! It’d prob end up being like metroid prime lmao

I was crunching to finish GR assignments (I need more time 😔) and had a realization. What if you remove gravity from GR? And it worked. Like, shockingly well. Is GR just a system to embed physics into a coordinate system? …isn’t this Lagrangian fluid dynamics? What a crazy plot twist wtf

Here’s a fun litmus test for you: does your sim produce the rainshadow effect & horse latitudes?

Holy fuck I can’t fucking believe the Kerr reparameterization worked holy shit even the naked singularity works

Sure some of the rays are bouncing off the horizon but rk4 is doing its best