Perigee

Impossible skies, rendered at honest scale.

Perigee is an interactive, cinematic sky experience that lets you bring planets, stars, and the Andromeda Galaxy impossibly close. Apparent sizes come from real geometry, while concise discoveries explain what is calculated, what is rendered, and what is described rather than simulated.

Explore Perigee live

Highlights

• Explore nine celestial objects across five object-specific distance states.
• Move between Rooftop, Hilltop, Lakeside, and Cabo da Roca viewpoints.
• Follow short guided encounters with optional prediction-and-reveal moments.
• Open sourced, state-aware discoveries without leaving the live scene.
• Capture a clean view, download it, or share a link that restores the same sky.
• Play optional ambient music, one piece per viewpoint, crossfaded as you move.
• Use the complete experience with a keyboard or reduced motion enabled.

Perigee is deliberately not a planetarium catalogue or physical-effects simulator. It calculates apparent angular size exactly; environmental lighting, surface treatments, and impossible proximity effects are authored visualizations.

Technology

• Nuxt 3 and Vue 3 for the application shell and accessible controls
• Three.js and custom shaders for the sky, celestial objects, and environments
• GSAP for interruptible scene choreography
• Native Web Audio for the looping, crossfaded ambient music
• Vitest and strict TypeScript for scientific and product contracts
• Static generation for deployment to Cloudflare Workers Static Assets

Run locally

Requirements:

• Node.js 24 or newer
• A browser with WebGL2

git clone git@github.com:aliaks-ei/perigee.git
cd perigee
npm ci
cp .env.example .env
npm run dev

The planet, approved Mars colour and Andromeda surface trees, about 247 MiB, are stored in Cloudflare R2 rather than in the repository. npm run dev, npm test, npm run build and npm run generate restore them first, verifying each archive against the SHA-256 in scripts/asset-bundles.json, so the first of those commands downloads them and the rest do nothing. npm run assets runs the same step on demand.

Open the local URL printed by Nuxt. No environment variable is required for ordinary local development. Analytics remains disabled unless an Umami website ID is explicitly configured.

Commands

Command	Purpose
npm run assets	Restore the observational asset trees from R2 on demand
npm run dev	Start the Nuxt development server
npm run typecheck	Run strict Nuxt and Vue TypeScript checks
npm test	Run the Vitest suite once
npm run test:watch	Run Vitest in watch mode
npm run build	Build the production application
npm run generate	Generate the static site
npm run verify	Run type checking, tests, and the production build
npm run assets:pack	Repack the asset trees for upload after regenerating them

Run npm run verify before opening a pull request.

Deployment

Cloudflare Workers Builds publishes main to perigee.observer. Build with Node 24 and npm run generate, then deploy the static output with Wrangler using wrangler.toml. The generate prehook restores the three checksum-verified R2 bundles, including all 673 approved Mars colour files. Keep existing published bundle keys immutable; give regenerated archives a new key and checksum in scripts/asset-bundles.json before opening a release PR. Verify a fresh checkout with npm ci, npm run assets, npm run verify and npm run generate, then review the preview before merging the protected branch. Physical-device touch, sustained performance and thermal checks remain separate from desktop browser tests.

Project structure

app/                    Nuxt components, composables, content, and UI helpers
src/perigee/            Framework-independent Three.js and Web Audio engines
assets/css/             Ordered global styles, tokens, and transitions
public/assets/          Runtime imagery, social cards, icons, and attribution
tests/                  Deterministic Vitest coverage for product contracts
docs/                   Active editorial, analytics, and curation procedures

The Vue layer owns product state and controls. The engine under src/perigee/ owns rendering and audio and does not depend on Vue. They meet through narrow typed interfaces in app/types/.

Content, privacy, and assets

• Scientific and editorial records live in app/data/editorial.ts; the review process is documented in docs/editorial-content.md.
• Analytics uses a provider-neutral event contract and excludes free-form text, precise location, and persistent visitor identifiers. See docs/engagement-events.md.
• Monthly features reuse approved encounters. The operating checklist is in docs/featured-encounters.md.
• Runtime asset sources, modifications, and licences are recorded in public/assets/ATTRIBUTIONS.md.

Contributing

Keep changes focused, preserve the minimal resting interface, and add regression tests when changing scientific calculations, editorial contracts, presets, or scene direction. Visual changes should include desktop and mobile evidence and must retain keyboard, focus, reduced-motion, and capability-fallback behavior.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow and SECURITY.md for private vulnerability reporting.

New runtime assets require complete provenance in public/assets/ATTRIBUTIONS.md before they ship.

License

The source code is available under the MIT License. Runtime assets retain the licences recorded in public/assets/ATTRIBUTIONS.md and are not relicensed by the MIT grant.