First Light

In astronomy, first light is the night a new telescope opens its eye for the first time. The first photons down the tube, the first faint smudge of a galaxy landing on the sensor. It isn't the finished science. It's quieter than that. It's proof the instrument works.

This is first light for deepskyapps.com.

A studio of one, charted as a constellation

DeepSkyApps is one person. Me. Rather than a wall of app icons and download badges, I wanted the portfolio to feel like what it actually is to me: a small set of fixed points I keep coming back to, each one made on purpose. So the apps are a constellation. Every one is a star with a catalog number, DSA-01 through DSA-06, the way real deep-sky objects get logged before anyone gives them a nicer name.

The line under the title says the quiet part out loud: every star here ships. No vapourware in the sky. If a star has a number, you can download it today. Or, for the newest one still warming up, watch it come online.

Small constellation, full attention

A studio of one changes what the software feels like, and that's the whole point.

There's no growth team inventing reasons to send you notifications, and no meeting where the feature you rely on gets cut. When you leave a review or email me, the person reading it is the person who wrote the code.

Six apps is not many. That's deliberate. I would rather keep a short list of things working well than a long list working badly.

How it's built, for the curious

For the developers who'll inevitably open View Source: the whole site is one HTML file. No framework, no build step, no third-party tracking. It went through fourteen design passes and landed at roughly 34 KB.

A few details I'm fond of:

• The starfield is a single <canvas>: a couple hundred stars, each twinkling on its own clock, drifting and wrapping at the edges.
• The nebulae are SVG feTurbulence noise, tinted through radial gradients borrowed from real Hubble palettes, then masked down to soft clouds.
• The only colour on the entire site lives inside the DEEPSKYAPPS wordmark. Hover it and a spectral wave runs through the letters. Everything else is black, white, and restraint.

None of that is necessary. All of it is the point: the site should feel like the apps do.

What Field Notes will be

Field Notes is the studio log. Expect build notes, App Store experiments (what moved the needle and what quietly flopped), release post-mortems, and the occasional honest account of running everything solo. Written by the same hands that ship the apps, which means no ghostwriters and no content calendar. When there's something worth writing down, it goes here.

That's the instrument check. The sky's open. Pick a star.