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How the sky is drawn
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01
Scatter
Stars are placed evenly over a sphere — evenly in area, not in latitude, which is why they do not bunch at the poles. Brightness follows a steep curve, so most of them are faint and only a handful are worth a name. Each gets a spectral class, and the class decides its colour.
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02
Join
The brightest hundred and fifty are swept for neighbours within a few degrees of each other. Each cluster is wired up as a minimum spanning tree, so the figure is always drawn with the shortest possible lines and never doubles back on itself.
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03
Name
Every figure gets an invented name, an epithet and a piece of folklore from a place that does not exist. Members are lettered by brightness in the old way, so the leading star of a figure is always its alpha.
The chart is a stereographic projection, the same one used on printed star atlases: angles are preserved, so a circle in the sky is still a circle on the page, and the price is that things swell as they slide towards the edge. Nothing is fetched and nothing is stored. Six rooms now share one integer — it draws the flow field on the front page, arranges the Garden, writes the Chimes, deals the Lattice, names the town in the Almanac, and tonight it hangs this sky. Come back tomorrow and every star above will have been taken down.