Home▸Space & Astronomy▸Brown Dwarf Cloud Map: Flat-Projection Light Curve Synthesizer

Brown Dwarf Cloud Map: Flat-Projection Light Curve Synthesizer

Interactive 2D brown-dwarf cloud map: a full-sphere photosphere unrolled into an equirectangular weather map, with a sweeping sub-observer visibility cap and a light curve computed by numerical quadrature over the cloud field.

Space & Astronomy2DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

This is the 2D counterpart to the 3D brown-dwarf weather simulator: rather than rendering a rotating sphere, it unrolls the whole photosphere once into a flat equirectangular cloud map — the same trick used to draw a map of a planet — and bakes a coherent cloud-density field onto that grid. A sub-observer marker sweeps across the map as the body spins, and the light curve is produced by numerically integrating visible-hemisphere brightness over the grid at every frame, exactly the disk-integrated quadrature behind real rotational-modulation photometry (e.g. Luhman 16B). Coverage, inclination, contrast and rotation period are all live-adjustable.

⚙ Under the hood

Unroll a spinning brown dwarf's patchy silicate clouds into a flat equirectangular weather map and watch a sub-observer marker sweep across it, generating a live light curve from numerical quadrature over the cloud field — the 2D grid-based counterpart to the 3D rotating-sphere simulator.

brown dwarfsubstellar objectcloud variabilitylight curveL/T transitionrotationequirectangular map2D

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install