Sol — solar and sky research explorer

Sol is a local-first research and learning application: a reduced solar-surface model, an observer's sky, and a Solar System view. The static browser uses native ES modules and audited Rust engines through raw WebAssembly. No runtime framework or bundler is required.

Earth rendered by SOL in PR #115, captured from the GitHub-built 0c0c2a1 candidate. NASA July 2004 surface imagery with historical cloud/night layers and illustrative lighting and cloud depth. See Earth appearance and provenance.

Actual 4096 × 4096 WebGL export from the approved Sun Surface Lab v2, at time zero with optional prominences off. The Solar System integration defaults to 1K, with 2K and 4K selectable in the Sun controls. This image records the approved appearance reference; it does not claim a deployed release. See Sun appearance, controls and provenance.

Current state

The September 2026 correctness/experience changes are implemented locally, not released or fully qualified. RFC 0002 remains Accepted. Existing public site/crate versions are separate artifacts and have not been revalidated as matching this checkout. Passing local tests do not establish hosted CI, accepted scientific/manual evidence or production approval.

Live contracts are solar-state-snapshot.v3, ephemeris-snapshot.v3, and system-snapshot.v1. Historical v2 remains separately inspectable; live readers reject unsupported versions rather than silently relabelling data.

What the application does

• Sun: an original NASA SDO/AIA observation with archival capture time and credits opens the experience. Research mode provides reduced Carrington-frame transport and illustrative cycle examples. The observation and model retain separate source identities. Current model region anchors are distinct from immutable birth positions. Activity variance is an illustrative scalar proxy; magnetic uncertainty is unavailable and confidence is a heuristic score, not a calibrated probability.
• My Sky: on-device observer/time calculations, geometric above-horizon grouping, searchable keyboard-native object rows, selected facts, and separately disclosed event status. Device civil time and UTC are explicit choices; coordinates do not imply a timezone.
• Solar System: WebGL2 and map views, catalogue-backed stars, body selection and independently selectable display scales. Display inflation is not physical distance. Moon interpolation is withheld outside its documented window; it is not a navigation or mutual-event ephemeris.
• Explore first: concise Sky/System cards show accepted scene facts. Search, location, time and detailed tools open on intent. Camera shortcuts use the existing physical centers; body selection does not open the full control panel. Verified NASA/mission archive previews remain separate from the 3-D appearance; unsupported sphere textures stay disabled.
• Planet looks (candidate): Solar System → View → Planet appearance offers attributed Solar System Scope maps for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These artistic reconstructions appear by default in fresh sessions; Source-qualified remains selectable. See RFC 0007 for review status and limits, and the rollout review for local evidence and outstanding delivery steps. Saturn's Illustrative look keeps the recovered Look Lab color response and defaults to sunlight shared with its rings and moons. Shadows follow the modeled Sun as the camera moves. Its body card also offers an explicit Look Lab inspection light to reveal polar colors, with moon-transit shadows disabled in that mode.
• Earth Look Lab appearance (candidate): the latest published Sites Earth joins Illustrative look: NASA July 2004 surface, dark-ocean grading, 1.6 display exposure, and the recovered cloud-volume/texture-lighting recipe. Source-qualified restores the existing Earth; daily swaths, sea ice and HDR retain that path. See RFC 0009 for provenance and limits.

Full solar solving, Sky events/tracks and System metadata run in bounded workers. Latest-intent scheduling cancels obsolete work and validates engine/schema/ABI/release/ generation identities before publication. The System view retains a fixed nine-body, 27-f64 position fast path; a local microprofile is not a cross-device performance guarantee.

Remote Sky is optional and requires an explicitly configured recipient and session-only consent before either health or location/time requests. Redirects are rejected before transmission to another recipient. Failure retains the last valid snapshot with visible status; local recovery is explicit. Share/export previews disclose the captured exact location/time before copying or downloading.

Run a local preview

Use an existing locked Rust toolchain with the WASM target, Python 3.11+, and Node 22 with this repository's pinned development tooling. Building is offline once dependencies and toolchains are installed. New output directories prevent accidental replacement.

$candidateSha = git rev-parse HEAD
python tools/build_wasm.py --locked --out-root build/wasm-review
python tools/build_web.py --wasm-dir build/wasm-review --out-root build/site-review --release-id local-review-1 --source-sha $candidateSha --repository OWNER/REPOSITORY --run-id 1
python -m http.server 8000 --bind 127.0.0.1 --directory build/site-review

Replace the repository placeholder with the actual candidate identity. Open the loopback preview in a browser. A dirty checkout's HEAD is lineage only, not exact source attestation. Do not serve the source tree as a production artifact or hand-edit cache tokens.

See instructions, operations and artifact delivery for validation, immutable namespaces, explicit update/rollback and held promotion policy.

Data and evidence

Public source acquisition is separately authorized network work. Default validation uses committed fixtures and references. Acquisition retains original bytes in immutable source bundles; derivation validates a complete research bundle before atomically selecting its pointer. Snapshot, observations, feed status and cycle frames cannot be mixed across bundle identities. Freshly generated does not mean freshly observed or published.

• Current specification and status/holds
• Solar v3 semantics and ephemeris v3 semantics
• Coefficient provenance and regeneration gaps
• Canonical generation and data sources
• Validation plan, accuracy contract and requirements

The three analytic coefficient blobs have immutable local hashes but missing original upstream inputs/serialization correspondence. They are explicitly non-regenerable from this checkout. The current eight TOP2013 records prove source-theory parity at recorded samples only, not independent pointing/range/event accuracy. Canonical moon generation qualification and new independent reference acquisition remain held.

Development checks

cargo test --workspace --locked
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings
npm test
python tools/typecheck_web.py
python tools/validate_sdlc.py
python tools/validate_docs.py
python tools/validate_ux_contract.py

Run the risk-specific Python, contract, staged-browser and coverage commands in the validation plan as well. Existing 90% coverage floors are requirements, not a claim that this local tree currently passes every coverage/platform gate. No full accessibility conformance or operational forecast authority is claimed.

Sol is not for navigation, occultation prediction, mission safety or operational space-weather warnings. space_weather_operational remains false. Project code is MIT OR Apache-2.0; third-party data attribution and outstanding coefficient notice correspondence are documented separately and are not resolved by that project license.