Wheelhouse — an observatory bulletin for 1.77 million charts
Natal charts, transits, and a catalogue computed to the arcminute, built to look like a printed bulletin, not a cosmic app.
Wheelhouse started as a local replacement for a couple of features I kept reaching for elsewhere — a natal chart tool and a searchable catalogue of public figures’ charts. It’s now live publicly, computed with the Swiss Ephemeris to the arcminute, with a catalogue of 1.77 million people.
The part I actually care about: it doesn’t look like an astrology app
Most chart software either goes cosmic-gradient-and-stars or clinical-and- spreadsheet. I wanted neither. Wheelhouse is styled as a printed observatory bulletin — warm paper, ink, one accent color doing all the work: a madder red, the color of sealing wax, reserved for tension aspects, the Sun, Earth, and anything interactive. No cards, no gradients, no dark-cosmic clichés, and deliberately none of astrology’s usual pink-and-lavender visual shorthand either — the audience skews female, and the right response to that is craft, not decoration.
The hero is a Three.js orrery — real heliocentric planet positions sampled
daily a year out, scrubbed by scroll, with a GLSL shader tracing each orbit’s
trail. It respects prefers-reduced-motion and degrades to plain paper if
WebGL isn’t available; the render loop pauses the moment the hero scrolls
off-screen so it isn’t burning cycles for no reason.
Audited, not assumed
Every route is checked at 390×844 for horizontal overflow and sub-44px tap targets — zero of either, by measurement, not by hope. The natal wheel drops its degree labels below 700px because at that width they’d render at about five physical pixels; the numbers move to a table underneath instead, still carried to the arcsecond. Small details like that are most of the actual work.
It shares a domain with Skravle rather than standing up its own infrastructure — one quiet footprint instead of two.