How this site is built.
The design is editorial, with a few deliberate constraints: one serif, one sans, one accent, no shadows, no gradients, no images as background.
Type
Body text is Source Serif 4, set 17 pixels with a generous 29-pixel leading, in 400 weight with proportional oldstyle figures by default. Headlines climb from 600 to 900 of the same family; the largest cuts run on display tracking and use Source Serif’s discretionary ligatures and stylistic alternates. Chrome — dateline, marginalia, section labels — uses Inter 400 / 500 / 600 at 13 px with wide tracking, lining tabular figures. No third typeface.
- marginalia 12 / 16 Updated 21·05·2026
- meta 13 / 19 PLATE I · GK-2A
- body 17 / 29 Set in Source Serif 4.
- h3 22 / 28 A sub-section head.
- h2 28 / 35 A section head, set serif.
- h1 40 / 42 Page heads run here.
- display 56 / 60 Major heroes.
- jumbo 84 / 80 The cover.
Colour
Background is a paper cream rather than white. Text is a slightly cool near-black. One accent — ink blue — is used for links, drop caps, hung folios, and the live-chain status mark.
Construction
Built with Astro and Tailwind as a small pnpm monorepo. Each subdomain is its own application sharing a single design system as a workspace package. Static at build time; no runtime backend.
Deployed via Cloudflare Pages with custom domains on the apex and four subdomains. Each build is a direct upload of the static output — no Git-connected CI in the loop.
Captures
The full-disk Earth on the home page comes from gs., the ground station. The receiver chain is a hand-built 60 cm parabolic trough, a linear dipole feed, a SAWbird+ GOES low-noise amplifier, and an RTL-SDR. Decoding runs through SatDump; post-processing through Sanchez.
Captures are dated and plate-numbered, and logged at the station before they appear on this site.
Provenance
If something on this site looks wrong, email me at the address in the footer. The ground-station captures carry per-frame provenance at gs.