Perihelion: Riding a Solar Storm Home
The story behind Perihelion
Commission Campaign site for Helia-1, a fictional heliophysics probe that flies into a coronal mass ejection — audience: the space-curious public; message: the sun is not a steady lamp, it’s weather, and you live inside it
Rivals Igloo Inc (Awwwards Site of the Year 2024) for craft coherence · Access Mars (ActiveTheory × NASA JPL) for space-agency immersion
Inspired by Coronal mass ejection (Wikipedia)
Built with Three.js · EffectComposer HDR pipeline · UnrealBloomPass · custom GLSL throughout · GSAP ScrollTrigger · Web Audio
Techniques Domain-warped FBM plasma · flux-loop arcade geometry · three-life particle system (CME / transit / magnetosphere) · layered aurora curtains · film grade + grain + chromatic aberration
Direction One unbroken shot from the photosphere to the aurora; solar gold darkening to void black and resolving in aurora green; Unbounded display + Martian Mono telemetry; interaction-scored synthesized audio
Result You stir a living star, watch its field wind up and snap, then ride the eruption 1 AU home and stand under the light it becomes
The Story
In the winter of 1859, a British astronomer named Richard Carrington watched a white-light flare erupt on the sun’s surface. Eighteen hours later, telegraph operators were pulling sparks off their equipment and auroras were visible in Cuba. The chain of events between those two moments — a magnetic field wound past its breaking point, a billion tons of plasma thrown across interplanetary space, a planet’s magnetic shield funneling the blow toward its poles — is one of the great causal stories in nature. Almost nobody has seen it whole.
Perihelion is the launch site for Helia-1, a mission that does not exist. The probe is fiction; every beat of the physics is real. Differential rotation really does wind the sun’s magnetic field like a spring, because the equator outruns the poles. Magnetic reconnection really does release it in one snap. And the aurora really is the storm, transformed — the same particles that left the sun arriving as light. The mission gives the story stakes; the physics gives it honesty.
The Take
The site is one continuous shot, scroll-driven, about four minutes long. You arrive at a living star — the loading sequence is the approach, a distance readout falling from 1.0 AU — and the first caption dares you: this is not a photograph. touch it. Your cursor stirs the photosphere. A sunspot pair surfaces. Field loops rise off the limb and visibly wind tighter as you scroll, until the screen flashes white, the audio cracks, and the coronal mass ejection tears off the limb in slow motion — a white-hot shock front leading an ember wake, with Helia-1 silhouetted a few pixels tall against the blast.
Then the camera turns home, and you ride it: 1,500,000 km/h of particle storm with Earth growing from a pale dot, live telemetry tracking your distance in AU. The magnetosphere takes the hit, bends, and channels the storm poleward — and the finale is the payoff of the whole causal chain: rayed aurora curtains rippling over the night side’s city lights, scored by synthesized VLF whistlers, the actual radio sound auroras make. The mission card ends it: we fly into the storm.
The Tech
The sun is a sphere carrying a domain-warped FBM plasma shader — two layers of warp feeding a granulation octave, graded against a Solar Dynamics Observatory reference plate. Limb darkening comes from the view-normal falloff; a chromosphere rim glows at the edge. The corona is a camera-facing billboard with angular-noise streamers. The cursor raycasts to the surface and swirls the noise domain locally — you are genuinely stirring the texture coordinates of a star.
The render pipeline is the point. Everything draws into a half-float HDR target, through UnrealBloomPass (threshold 0.72, so only genuinely hot pixels bloom), then a custom grade pass: manual Reinhard tone mapping (ACES crushes dark scenes with mixed emissives), warm gain over a cool shadow floor, radial chromatic aberration, vignette, and animated grain. Geometry colors run up to 2.7× over white and the pipeline brings them home — the difference between a particle demo and a film frame.
The field lines are tube-geometry flux loops planted in the sunspot pair, each in its own slightly tilted plane so they read as an arcade; scroll shears the arcade sideways as the field “winds up,” and their shader heats them from solar gold to electric blue-white as tension builds. The CME is a 15,000-particle system with three lives: it erupts with a swirl term around the ejection axis (a flux rope, not a cone), a white-hot shock front, and progressive activation so material visibly tears off the limb; in transit the same pool becomes the storm streaming past the camera; at Earth it becomes the funnel, steering along field lines toward the poles. The aurora is four layered curtain planes with two octaves of ray structure — coarse curtains rippled by your cursor, fine striations on top — rising from behind an Earth night-side disc generated with FAL.
The sound is entirely synthesized in Web Audio, unlocked on first touch: brown-noise solar roar through a 110 Hz lowpass, a highpass crack plus sine drop for the reconnection snap, bandpass wind tied to scroll velocity in transit, and exponential downward sweeps for the auroral whistlers. Everything in the piece is computed — which is the point. The only things from the real world are the paper-thin facts underneath.
This blog post was AI generated with Claude Code. Authored by Artificial Noodles.