Alex Marshall
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alxm.me
Alex Marshall
@alxm.me
58 followers 140 following 42 posts
Visual artist, humanist, and creator of things. Science and engineering educated in California, raised in Europe. Based in London, UK.

Creator of Stellata: https://stellata.xyz
Other stuff, including artwork: https://alxm.me
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Alex Marshall @alxm.me · Aug 16
This is not a photograph, but it is the same moment that the famous "Earthrise" photo was captured by the Apollo 8 crew on 24 December, 1968.

What you're seeing is a screenshot of an in-browser 3D model of our solar system, the galaxy, and eventually our universe that I'm building. Link in thread →
3D rendered view from space in an app called Stellata with the Earth's moon in the foreground, and the Earth in the distance, captured at exactly the time and orientation of the famous "Earthrise" photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew that orbited the Moon for the first time in December 1968.
alxm.me
1/8 Which way is up? I replicated the Apollo program's FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator) instrument to help users orient themselves while exploring in Stellata. An attitude indicator (the other type of AI) tells you…

🔭 #Astronomy #SpaceSky #BuildInPublic #AstroCoding
September 3, 2026 at 1:17 PM
alxm.me
🧵 There's a partial lunar eclipse next week: see the entire ~6 hour event in just over a minute. It's not a coincidence that lunar eclipses follow solar eclipses a few weeks later. The Moon and Earth swap positions, and the alignment is often...

🔭 #Astronomy #SpaceSky #BuildInPublic #AstroCoding
August 22, 2026 at 11:20 AM
alxm.me
One month of lunar rotation in 2.5min (model clock sped up to 4.6hr/sec), with a guest appearance from Earth in early September. And what's up with that shadow in the middle? That's the next partial lunar eclipse happening next week on 28 August...

🔭 #Astronomy #SpaceSky #BuildInPublic #AstroCoding
August 21, 2026 at 4:52 PM
alxm.me
My current challenge is cross-browser-platform performance, so I'm migrating from WebGL to WebGPU. After implementing an HDR pipeline with a beautiful, adaptive scene model, perf has taken a hit. Certainly some optimisation to do within ... 🧵

🔭 #Astronomy #SpaceSky #BuildInPublic #AstroCoding
August 20, 2026 at 3:39 PM
alxm.me
The 🌕 has some pretty wild craters on it! This shows the maps that are stored to render surface lighting for any ray direction. Red is the horizon map, shown summed for all directions simultaneously, and blue is the normal surface deviation map.

🔭 #Astronomy #SpaceSky #BuildInPublic #AstroCoding
August 18, 2026 at 11:30 AM
alxm.me
It turns out that rendering bumpy surfaces is tricky! This is the same view as yesterday's post, but notice that the terminator detail looks different. It's the same underlying photographic texture, but can you tell what I improved? Solution in 🧵👇

🔭 #Astronomy #SpaceSky #BuildInPublic #AstroCoding
August 17, 2026 at 10:44 PM
alxm.me
This is not a photograph, but it is the same moment that the famous "Earthrise" photo was captured by the Apollo 8 crew on 24 December, 1968.

What you're seeing is a screenshot of an in-browser 3D model of our solar system, the galaxy, and eventually our universe that I'm building. Link in thread →
3D rendered view from space in an app called Stellata with the Earth's moon in the foreground, and the Earth in the distance, captured at exactly the time and orientation of the famous "Earthrise" photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew that orbited the Moon for the first time in December 1968.
August 16, 2026 at 11:19 PM
Reposted by Alex Marshall
mubashariqbal.com
Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn't a list of them for people to find.

So I built it:
blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack...

The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database.

Missed your stater pack? Message me and I'll get it added.
All - Bluesky Directory
A curated collection of all things relating to the Blue Sky social media platform.
blueskydirectory.com
November 11, 2024 at 4:13 PM