Deep

Field

A field of twenty-four thousand points

Each star owns a rest position scattered across the viewport volume and a formation target sampled from a procedural spiral. A per-star stagger delays its departure, so the gather ripples outward instead of snapping.

The disc is two dominant arms unwinding from a dense core, each fragmenting into short spurs — flocculent rather than grand-design. Cool blues sit on the outer arms, warm ambers scatter mid-disc.

The pointer has momentum

Every star carries a screen-space offset, a velocity and a mass. The cursor path is a capsule: whatever falls inside its radius takes an impulse along the stroke, a curl perpendicular to it, and a pull toward the cursor itself. Heavy stars move less.

Nothing is stepped naively — the coast between impulses is evaluated in closed form from two exponentials, one for drag and one for the spring home, so the field drifts back to its true position over a couple of seconds no matter the frame rate.

Scroll dissolves it

Over roughly the first one and a half viewport heights the formation unwinds: positions mix back to the scattered field, most stars are pushed out of the reading column, point size falls to half and opacity to just over a half.

A depth-weighted parallax term rides along with it, so near stars drift about three and a half times as far as the distant ones.

Everything is analytic

No sprite texture. The fragment shader builds a soft disc with a gamma-tightened core, a thin four-point cross for the brightest stars only, and reconstructs sub-pixel energy with a radial cubic B-spline so tiny stars do not flicker.