A few weeks ago someone created an issue in the Gaia Sky Codeberg repository requesting the addition of aurorae to the Earth. They used as an example the aurora add-on in Cosmographia¹, which, at the time, looked to me like it was using some kind of billboard particle system to generate the effect. I never thought it looked particularly good for an aurora; I thought Gaia Sky could do better. So I set on a quest to implement a better looking aurora object in Gaia Sky. This wee quest would involve implementing three very different approaches to aurora rendering over the span of a few weeks, plus more than half a dozen 3D volume nebulae.

In this post, I present the three different methods I implemented to render aurorae. But before anything, I need to take a small detour and talk about nebulae.

I first discovered Jujutsu a few weeks ago, and I was immediately intrigued. At first glance, it looked like a simple wrapper around Git, but the deeper I looked, the more impressed I became with its design. Jujutsu, I discovered, offers a new and fresh spin to DVCSes that leads to cleaner and simpler workflows.

In this post, I have a look at what Jujutsu has to offer, and I dive into its command line interface and workflow. My goal is that, by the end of this post, you can understand a little bit why I find this tool so cool.

Today I have updated my $EDITOR variable to point to Helix instead of Neovim, and also configured Yazi to use it as the first option for text. I have used [Neo]vim since forever, so what made me switch? In this post, I discuss some of the ups and downs of both editors and what ultimately made me decide for Helix.

Nowadays, makefiles are ubiquitous in software. Most C and C++ projects have used them historically, and still use them as a build system. Nowadays, lots of projects written in other languages which have their own build tools also use them, not to make files, but to store and run commands in an organized manner. If this is you, you are doing it wrong. However, there is a tool designed to do just that: just.

Do you want to add a canvas with a shader running in real time to your Hugo site? In this post I show how to create a Hugo shortcode to display a shader.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the procedurally generated planets in Gaia Sky. In this post, I provided a more or less detailed technical overview of the process used to procedurally generate planetary surfaces and cloud layers.

Since then, we have used the system to spice up the planets in the planetary systems for which the Gaia satellite could determine reasonable orbits (see the data here, and some Gaia Sky datasets for some of those systems here, including HD81040, Gl876, and more).

However, with the upcoming Gaia DR4, the number of candidate exoplanets is expected to increase significantly, rendering the “one dataset per system” approach unmaintainable. In this post I describe some of the improvements made with regards to exoplanets in Gaia Sky, in both the handling of large numbers of extrasolar systems seamlessly, and in the brand new, improved procedural generation of planetary surfaces and clouds.