Why a telescope site shows you no pictures of space.
DEEPFIELD STATION is a 1978 mission console for a deep-space photon telescope, played straight. No hero image, no scroll story — you sit the operator's seat. The page boots, hands you a command line, and then the station simply runs: telemetry ticks, the survey map slews, Houston mumbles on the air-ground loop, and every so often the sky misbehaves and the whole room goes amber. The copy is NASA-transcript laconic on purpose; a console that says less feels more real.
┤ 04 / 25 ├The CRT is pure CSS layered over the document: a repeating-linear-gradient for scanlines, a second 90° pass for the aperture grille, a radial-gradient vignette with a huge inset box-shadow for tube curvature, and a low-amplitude steps() flicker animation blended with mix-blend-mode: overlay. Phosphor bloom is just doubled text-shadow.
The starfield is a 2D canvas drawing glyphs, not pixels — VT323 characters (· + *) placed on a character grid by a seeded mulberry32 PRNG, twinkling on per-star sine phases while the whole field drifts sidereally. The reticle is box-drawing characters (┌ ┐ └ ┘) slewed between catalog targets with an ease-in-out cubic; the RA/DEC readout interpolates real coordinates along the same curve. Between slews it never sits dead still — a summed-sine dither nudges the whole crosshair by a couple of pixels, the same texture as the ticking GUIDE DRIFT figure, so the map reads as a live servo instead of a frozen graphic. Click the field and the dish points there for real: the cursor position converts to a synthetic RA/DEC, the gimbal slews, and the event log gets an operator line.
Everything shares one requestAnimationFrame loop with an accumulated console clock: typewriter jobs (a small queue that types boot lines, command responses, and a live SCAN progress bar), telemetry noise, ambient log chatter, the auto-demo operator, and the alarm scheduler. Hide the tab and the loop cancels — the station politely holds its breath.
MASTER ALARM is a single class on <body> that rewrites the CSS custom-property palette green→amber; canvas colors chase the same value through a lerped mix factor, so DOM and starfield change key together. prefers-reduced-motion skips the boot typewriter, stills the flicker and klaxon blink, and snaps slews.
┤ NO LIBRARIES ├Pass one built the boot sequence, panel grid, and starfield, then fixed a grid-blowout bug that had pushed the reticle off every phone screen. Pass two went after motion and interaction: every lazy ease keyword was swapped for named cubic-beziers, panel entrances stayed but the reticle gained continuous idle dither, and the map became genuinely clickable — point-and-slew, not just watch. Pass three chased craft that only shows up under scrutiny: MASTER ALARM now writes its own banner text and lifts aria-hidden on trigger, since a static live region that never mutates never gets announced; command responses get a once-per-line screen-reader summary instead of silence; and testing shorter windows found a real bug — telemetry rows spilling past their panel with no overflow containment, fixed with a scrolling .panel-body. The rule stands: screenshot, believe the pixels — and test a size the harness doesn't.
┤ CKSUM 4A7F OK ├