Another WIP renderer for the Gaia dataset.
Prior art: my star-stream project in Haskell.
Some rough goals for this project:
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Use Rust not Haskell this time (it's a learning exercise - I prefer Haskell in general but want more experience with Rust).
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Build an equal area quadtree to index star positions, using the HEALPix top-level regions as initial squares. This has to be able to page to and from disk using a memory-resident cache of some kind.
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Allow rendering of arbitrary sky regions (
star-streamdid this very poorly) by using queries on the HEALPix quad-tree. -
Render using arbitrary point-spread functions and better sampling approaches than
star-stream. -
Render to high dynamic range images (eg. OpenEXR, Radiance HDR).
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Create giant prints of the night sky on an Epson P906 printer. I have ordered one of these printers!