Visnu Pitiyanuvath

There's a flashing object in there that I'm guessing is Neptune or Uranus undergoing some bad floating point wackiness with magnitude??

What's the easiest way for me to embed this animation—and perhaps the form for highlighting constellations, etc.—into my post? I think ideally I'd be able to just do

```
import { planets } from "@visnup/re-we-need-more-tiny-knowledge-projects-heres-one"
```

Then, as this notebook is improved, the original post would pick up the new visualization?

James Somers

Ah, I just named the cell and republished it so you should be able to:

```
import { chart } from "@visnup/re-we-need-more-tiny-knowledge-projects-heres-one"
```

In your own notebook! You can also rename “chart” within your notebook using an `as` clause (e.g. { chart as visnupPlanets }). 

I’ve been planning to update this a bit using the background from https://observablehq.com/@visnup/threejs-star-map. If you want exactly this zdog version now and into the future, you can version pin it, but I’m on my phone and the exact version number and incantation alludes me at present.

Oh, and to drive the date using a slider and for lat/lng to factor into the default view are also on my todo list.

Awesome, thanks! Just added it to the initial post. I'll be excitedly following along with the improvements :D

Updated with a scrubber plus rendering using three.js!

So, the unpinned import that you currently have in your notebook will always give you the latest version. If you want a historical snapshot you should be able to import that one using:

```
import { chart as visnupPlanets474 } from '@visnup/re-we-need-more-tiny-knowledge-projects-heres-one@474
```

Awesome! For now I'm going to use the 474 pinned version because the new three.js version, while obviously cooler, seems to be a bit of a performance hog at least on my machine: the motion isn't quite as smooth and the page scrolls a bit choppily :/

TODO list:
- performance: seems to be able to do 60 fps(?) but also makes my fan turn on... hacky idea would be to pre-render the celestial sphere as a texture on the inside of a sphere
- Earth location setting to inform the horizon and cardinal directions and angle of the sky for time of year
- planet labels or colors or textures
- star colors are available via catalog data

Fixed performance mostly by learning about THREE.Points, which makes rendering all the stars cheaper, but makes highlighting an individual constellation harder.

Performance looks much better! I tried importing the new `chart` but it doesn't behave as well on my post—any idea why?

Also if I want to peg to a revision where do I find that number? (the 474 or whatever.) Thanks again!

Oh, as for TODOs... now that this is using three.js and THREE.Points, is it possible to have the background stars move (so that they're not totally static over time)?

The background stars can easily rotate, but the main reason I haven't done that yet is because I don't know how much to rotate them by every frame. :) I'm lumping that into the whole "earth location matters" bucket, which should inform how to draw a horizon and what part of the sky should be "up" at any given date and time.

I don't think there's a good answer still for how to find the revision numbers for other people's notebooks. For your own, you can go to "View history" in the notebook ... menu in the top right, but for others, you'll need to follow these steps https://talk.observablehq.com/t/feature-request-provide-notebook-version-or-pinned-slug-through-web-ui/2381.

I updated my previous suggestion (https://observablehq.com/compare/1838567c160ca917@721...9d9a9ed9f98ca1aa@752) which I think works now. I had to make a few tweaks to both notebooks to allow it to work as an import.

I added an SVG overlay with planet names and the path of Mars: https://observablehq.com/@sanderevers/re-we-need-more-tiny-knowledge-projects-heres-one

Sander Evers

Cool! I particularly like the little tail on Mars :D