The homepage used to be a picture of Earth. Now it is a small solar system you can drag around, and every body in it is a part of this site:

• The Sun is home.

• Earth is Projects.

• Mars is Races. Red, dusty, and slightly painful. It fits.

• The asteroid belt is Notes, which is honest: a few rocks, mostly empty space.

• Saturn is Reading. The arc of its ring shows how far I am through the series on my shelf.

Click a planet and the camera flies to it and opens a card with a link. Double-tap empty space to fly back out.

Things that took longer than they should have

• Saturn’s ring. A planet in focus is framed by what is drawn, not by its sphere. For Saturn that means the ring, so the sphere had to shrink to about 40% of the room to keep the ring clear of the text.

• The camera chasing a moving planet. Easing toward the planet’s position left the camera 0.4 to 1.4 units behind it, which was more than the gap to the card.

• Double-tap. A 500 ms window, a 40 px slop for fingers, and a rule that the Sky card waits until the window closes, so one tap cannot do two things.

• The angle. The camera looks down 30 degrees, not 21. It makes the orbits rounder and fills the hero better.

why?

because why not?

checkout xo.nasser1931.com for a suprise 👀

Textures are from Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0), based on NASA imagery.