Skymap
a 3D galaxy catalog explorer in the browser via WebGPU
Details
- External ID
- 48037383
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Skymap
- Website domain
- rulkens.com
- Launched
- May 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1147011308562197
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- creative coding and visual experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- 3d galaxy visualization tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The web UI is simple, but writing efficient WebGPU compute and render pipelines to stream and display millions of astronomical catalog data points with spatial indexing requires specialized 3D graphics expertise.
What it would actually take: Building Skymap requires WebGPU (WGSL) shaders for instanced billboard rendering, frustum culling, and point rendering at 60 FPS across millions of nodes. Data ingestion involves preprocessing multi-gigabyte astronomical catalogs (SDSS, GLADE) into spatial hierarchies (Octrees or BVH) and streaming LOD chunks over HTTP using binary buffers. Expertise in graphics engineering, WGSL, and high-performance data structures is essential.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Anton Petrov's galaxy catalog videos (YouTube), Repper (designer's day job, pattern-design tool)
Concerns raised: Dataset only spans ~2% of observable universe, UX has rough edges, Code quality concerns with agentic development speed, Potential cosmology math errors (non-astronomer built)
Feature requests: Mobile gestures support, Production-grade robustness improvements
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 575 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #500 of 576 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 187 days after the earliest competitor.
- StarScope · hn · 2026-06-15 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Cartopolis, interactive globe-sized 3D world · hn · 2026-09-27 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Asciimap · hn · 2026-03-31 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Centauri-Dashboard · github · 2026-09-12 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- multicursor-mappings.nvim · github · 2026-09-26 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Small World · hn · 2026-07-05 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- refgarden · github · 2026-09-18 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PolyCSS · hn · 2026-05-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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