What AsteriaStar covers

AsteriaStar is four things that share one data layer. Knowing which one you are looking at makes the whole platform easier to use — and makes it obvious what this publication is for.

The reference layer

A scientific encyclopedia built as a knowledge graph rather than as a set of pages: stars, exoplanets, galaxies, deep-sky objects, missions, spacecraft, instruments, observatories, agencies, launch vehicles, meteor showers, the history of the field.

The distinguishing property is field-level provenance. A value is not simply printed — it carries where it came from, how it was derived, and how confident that makes it. A derived quantity records the formula that produced it and the inputs it consumed. This is the layer that answers what is known about this object.

The live layer

Real external providers, connected end to end and labelled honestly [2]: space weather from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, solar events from NASA's DONKI, near-Earth objects from JPL's Center for NEO Studies and the IAU Minor Planet Center, the International Space Station's position from NASA's own published trajectory, eclipse predictions from NASA/GSFC's five-millennium catalogue, and launch schedules from an openly licensed aggregator.

The governing rule is that a provider that cannot be reached shows nothing. Not a cached value presented as current, not a zero, not an estimate. A value that is six hours old says it is six hours old. This layer answers what is happening right now.

The observing layer

Twilight, the Moon, planetary visibility, ISS passes, a dated events calendar, and a personal observing plan for coordinates you type. Everything location-dependent is computed in your own browser, so the platform never receives your location — a guarantee enforced by where the code runs rather than by a promise in a policy.

Its accuracy is measured rather than claimed: computed instants are checked on every build against NASA's published lunar-phase tables, the US Naval Observatory's season instants and JPL Horizons positions, and the errors those checks find are the uncertainties printed on the pages.

The open layer

A public read-only API [1], graph exports, per-dataset downloads with real checksums, and an OpenAPI specification. Every response carries a provenance envelope. No key, no account, no rate limit theatre.

A note on how this is published

This article, and every other, lives in a repository of its own and deploys to a Netlify project of its own. Publishing one rebuilds a handful of pages in a few seconds. It does not rebuild the ~9,200 prerendered pages of the scientific platform, because the platform is a different application that happens to share a hostname.

Where the Journal sits

The encyclopedia is the reference; the Journal is the reporting.

A page about a star states what is known about that star and does not change when something happens. An article about a result concerning that star is timely, has an author and a date, argues a point, and links back to the reference page rather than restating it.

That division is deliberate and it is enforced: articles here do not duplicate encyclopedia prose. Where the two touch, the article links. It keeps the reference layer canonical, keeps the reporting honest about being reporting, and means neither is competing with the other for the same reader or the same search result.