Colophon

Deep Sky Creations is an independent game studio, and this site is both its shopfront and its notebook: the games, and the original astrophotography, interactive orrery and curated reference catalog the studio came out of. It is a small, slow corner of the internet on purpose — looking up still feels like the most surprising thing you can do, and a quiet, well-made archive is a kinder place to keep that than a feed.

Framework

Astro 6 (server output, prerendered pages)

UI islands

React 19

Styling

Tailwind v4 (CSS-first @theme)

3D scene

Three.js + react-three-fiber + drei

Ephemeris

astronomy-engine (VSOP87 / Meeus)

Database

Postgres (Azure Flexible Server) + Drizzle ORM

Hosting

Azure App Service (Linux, Node 22) behind nginx

CI / CD

Azure Pipelines, self-hosted build agent

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. The daily imagery is drawn from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, synced in as a deliberate step and then served from this site's own copy — the build itself is offline and never calls out to NASA, so a bad night at someone else's data centre cannot take this site down with it.

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.