because single snapshots and words do not cut it.
All planetary calculations use NASA's CSPICE toolkit — the same ephemeris used in space mission planning. I wrote the bulk of this application in Rust and use FFI bindings to call spkezr_c and a handful of other CSPICE functions directly, then built all the aspect math on top of that from scratch.
The whole app is a single Rust binary — no JS runtime, no separate API server. Static assets from Next.js are served straight out of Rust. I've successfully tested this on tiny ARM64 Linux boxes (t4g.nano & RPi5). The database is LMDB, which is stupid fast, and responses are cached so CSPICE is never called twice for the same calculation.
The charts are uPlot under the hood — basically the only thing that could handle this data volume without me building a renderer from scratch. Everything visual on top of that is custom.
what's next
GA release is ~2-3 months out. Between now and then: swapping in a thread-safe Rust SPICE implementation to unlock multi-tenancy at scale, shipping the natural language interface — ask a question, get a chart — and moving from flat ecliptic projections into real 3D (4D?) space. The calcs are done. uPlot just doesn't do it justice.
The engineering is in good shape. What I'm looking for isn't more of that.
The sun and the moon are not the only natural bodies that we can use to mark time — or that may have measurable effects on life on Earth.
We know electromagnetic fields operate body-to-body. We know radiation and heat travel from the sun. We know gravity moves oceans. At what point does it stop? And why would we assume we've already found that point?
No causal claim is being made here. This is a novel measurement tool that can be used to explore the surface of any correlations. See below for some examples from the past few centuries.
World War II
Revolution, Relativity, and the Fed
The Seeds of the 20th Century
Death of Napoleon, Birth of Nations, Monroe Doctrine
Year Without a Summer, Panic of 1819, Anarctica
Steam Engine, Australia & New Zealand, Boston Massacre
Boston Tea Party, Start of Continental Congress, Poland Partitioned
American Rev., Prequel to French Rev., Shay's Rebellion, Constitutional Convention
This has obvious applications in aerospace, research, and anywhere precise planetary data meets a need for better tooling. If that's your world — or you fund people building in it — I'd like to hear from you.
Not looking for engineering help. Looking for the right people.
Mention CSPICE in your first message so I know you read this far.
joseph@dutchdata.io