finderscope v3-4

accidentally sank 6 hours into this one but it’s the session that where you feel like looking through something instead of staring at a flat projection

naked eye orientation

turns out this was already sorted from v1, the x-axis flip that was in there from the start so I didn’t have to touch the projection maths, just double checked that north stays up on canvas and left it alone.

the real work was making that hold up once the camera can move anywhere, not just the handful of fixed constellation centres it used to snap to.

drag to pan

the camera is now a proper mutable cameraRA/cameraDec instead of being locked to target.center. dragging works out a small angular delta per mousemove event using a small-angle approximation (fine since consecutive drag events are tiny steps, not one big jump), and shifts the camera opposite in ra and dec so the sky moves with your cursor like a map, not like a first-person look-around.

findInView had to change too since “who’s a neighbour” used to be based on the target’s fixed centre, now it’s based on wherever the camera’s actually pointing.

clamped cameraDec to ±89.5° so dragging into a pole doesn’t divide by zero and send the camera into deep space 💀

added touch support alongside mouse since drag is the kind of interaction that should just work on mobile too.

what’s next

• learn mode, hemisphere split
• octans pole clutter still unresolved from v2
• some kind of scoring/streak system