Colophon

Deep Sky Creations is a small, slow corner of the internet for original astrophotography, an interactive orrery of the solar system, and a curated reference catalog of the night sky. It exists because looking up still feels like the most surprising thing you can do, and because a quiet, well-made archive is a kinder place to keep that than a feed.

Framework

Astro 6 (static output)

UI islands

React 19

Styling

Tailwind v4 (CSS-first @theme)

3D scene

Three.js + react-three-fiber + drei

Ephemeris

astronomy-engine (VSOP87 / Meeus)

Hosting

Azure Static Web Apps

CI / CD

Azure Pipelines (daily APOD rebuild)

Object coordinates, distances, and identifiers are pulled from the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database and SIMBAD at the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg. Encyclopedic context comes from Wikipedia, credited per entry. Today's Cosmos refreshes from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day archive each morning at 06:00 UTC.

Imagery used in catalog entries is credited to the agency that produced it — typically NASA, ESA, JPL, or the Space Telescope Science Institute. Original astrophotography on the gallery is the photographer's own work.

The site is set in Fraunces (Undercase Type), a variable serif drawn for the Open Foundry, used here in italic almost everywhere it appears. Body and metadata is Inter (Rasmus Andersson). Tabular figures and instrument labels are set in the system monospace stack — SF Mono, Menlo, and friends.

The colour vocabulary is small on purpose: a near-black background, a warm off-white for body, and a single accent orange used as a reading-register tick.

Captures are made with a Celestron Origin smart telescope from a backyard observatory in Rockford, Michigan. The Origin is a 640 mm-focal-length, f/2.2 RASA-style instrument with a built-in CMOS sensor; it stacks short exposures live and produces calibrated frames that this site re-edits and presents as long-form captures.