Cesium's default Tycho-2 sky box is six 1024² JPEGs stretched 3–6× around
the whole-globe view, so space read as an over-compressed JPEG (HAL-627).
The scene now draws its own sky in the Scene#skyBox slot: the 9,096 stars
of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue as point sprites sized in CSS pixels
(magnitude → width and opacity, B−V → colour), over a soft, star-free
Milky Way cube map built from ESO/S. Brunier's panorama (CC BY 4.0). Both
layers share one ICRF→Earth-fixed rotation at the scene clock, with the
TEME rotation filling in until Cesium's IAU 2006 tables load.
Assets total 482 KB, built by scripts/build-bright-stars.mjs and
scripts/build-milky-way.mjs. Frame time and the idle render governor are
unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>