Roadmap · version 0.37
Where this is going.
One rule decides the order: reproduce everything that could have been visible in that sky at that moment — by data where a record exists, by calculation where none does, and never by invention. What follows is a plan, not a promise; the order moves when a real case makes it move.
Already there#
Everything below is shipped and in production. It is here because a roadmap that only lists what is missing gives no sense of what the missing things are being added to.
| Area | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Testimony | Shape, movement, colour, transparency, halo, brilliance, blur, sound — keyframed; angular size only, with real distances derived as inequalities from what the object crossed |
| The sky | Sun, Moon and phase, planets, stars to magnitude 7.5, twilight limiting magnitude, the Milky Way and the zodiacal light as line-of-sight integrals |
| Sky candidates | Meteor showers with a sporadic background, 23 naked-eye comet apparitions, the satellite illumination window with the dated SATCAT count |
| Atmospheric optics | 22° and 46° haloes, sundogs, tangent, circumzenithal and circumhorizontal arcs, the parhelic circle, pillars — all from ice's refractive index; rainbows and moonbows ray-traced in a spherical drop |
| Weather | ERA5 lookup keyframed along the observation, cloud decks, rain, snow, hail, storms with thunder, wind, cloud attenuation of every celestial body |
| The ground | Real relief and aerial imagery, buildings, trees, streetlights, vehicles, windows and other witnesses, with moving tracks and regulated flashing lights |
| The instrument | Eye vs rectilinear lens, sensor and focal length in millimetres, letterboxed frame, aperture, focus distance, roll, and a long exposure that accumulates star trails and dots a flashing lamp |
| Provenance | Place, weather, elevation, imagery and time zone all read from named, swappable sources, with the exact query kept in the file |
Next#
Volumetric clouds next#
The current deck stops at a virtual wall of fixed height, where real cloud is visible all the way to the horizon. A first attempt was abandoned on quality. Only a real 3D density model will do — to fly through (aerial sightings) as well as to hide the object behind (from the ground). The known cost: the cloud field is mirrored on the CPU to answer “was this screen point occluded?”, and a 3D density field means rebuilding that mirror.
Atmospheric re-entries next#
A staple misidentification, and one of the few that leaves a testimony everybody recognises: a slow train of fragments, then “it went out all at once”. No usable record exists per event, so this is an object placed by hand — but with the real extinction as it enters the Earth's shadow, which is the part that makes the account fit.
A satellite pass actually propagated planned#
Today the tool answers whether low orbit could have been lit, and refuses to draw a pass it cannot know. For recent dates that refusal is unnecessary: current orbital elements are openly served and SGP4 is standard. So: a real pass for dates within about thirty days of the elements' epoch, with the regime stated on screen — computed, or placed by hand.
Radar propagation anomalies blocked on data#
Temperature inversions and ducting — the explanation behind a whole family of radar/visual cases. The criterion is a refractivity gradient below −157 units per kilometre, which needs the temperature and humidity profile with height. Checked and ruled out: Open-Meteo does not serve pressure levels in archive mode. The real source is IGRA, the radiosonde archive, and that is what this is waiting on.
Historical novae and supernovae planned#
A new star where there was none is a textbook misperception, and a datable one. The catalogue is small and public — the same pattern as the comet and satellite catalogues already generated here.
A real atmospheric scattering model planned#
The sky dome is still a gradient between colour stops — the least physical piece of the whole scene, and what stands between this and a genuinely correct twilight. Half the work is already done: the night-sky brightness model written for the Milky Way and the zodiacal light (airglow floor, directional twilight excess, the Moon's own contribution, in nanolamberts) is the same quantity, from the other end.
Weather balloons considered#
A documented network of launches from the 1940s on — and the Roswell explanation. Datable, placeable, and a shape nobody expects.
On the object's side#
Textures on shapes planned#
Blended with the colour rather than replacing it, keyframed and serialized like every other appearance field. Witnesses describe surfaces — ribbed, matte, mirror-like — and today the format cannot hold that.
Observed entities design open#
Three of the four shipped case files involve one. The open question is whether an entity is a 2D shape (testimony, like the object) or a 3D decor object. The model says “what reached the witness's eye”, which argues for the shape.
On the environment's side#
Observing from an aircraft planned#
As already supported from a building or a car. Half of aviation testimony is given from a cockpit, and a window frame that hides fifteen degrees of sky is part of the account.
Downloaded 3D models, on demand planned#
Real dashboards, real windscreen pillars — to see exactly what angular width a pillar masked. And the inverse case, which matters more: real aircraft seen from the ground and taken for something else, at the angle and with the reflections they actually give.
Reflections of interior lights on glazing planned#
A room lamp, a dashboard light, on a window or a windscreen. The last missing piece of “being inside” — and, on its own, the explanation of a good number of accounts.
How the order gets decided#
By which misperception the item lets someone actually test, and by whether the data or the physics for it exists. Something with no record behind it does not get invented — it either gets computed from first principles, or it stays a hand-placed object that the interface admits is hand-placed.
If you have a case that needs something on this list — or something that is not on it — say so. A real dated, placed, sourced sighting moves an item up this page faster than anything else can.