ContributorMural::Renderers::Constellation
Inherits ContributorMural::Renderer < Reference < Object
A night sky: every contributor is a star whose size and glow follow their rank, near neighbours join up into constellations, and a scatter of tiny dust stars fills the dark between them. Placement is a hash-jittered lattice — the cells are disjoint, so however the jitter lands no star can touch another — with the occupied cells themselves picked by hash, which is what makes the sky read as scattered rather than ruled.
Constants
Hard ceiling on dust per section, so a wall of hundreds cannot swell the file with thousands of circles.
Dust never comes closer to an avatar's rim than this.
Halo radius as a multiple of the star's own: the tail glows a little past its rim, the top of the ranking half again as far. The canvas padding is derived from HALO_MAX, so the brightest halo just fits.
How far a line stops short of the rim it points at.
A trimmed stub shorter than this reads as a speck, not a line.
Longest constellation edge kept, in cell pitches. The spanning tree connects everything; pruning it back to its short edges is what breaks the sky into separate constellations instead of one long snake.
Instance methods
Pixel size at which to fetch this user's avatar (2x render size for crisp display on high-DPI screens).
Rank drives size and glow exactly like the spiral's taper: a power curve below 1 drops quickly among the leaders and then runs nearly flat, so the long tail stays a uniform field of faint stars.