Nakshatra: Stargazing in Total Darkness (Because Phone Screens Blind Your Eyes)

Description and use

Nakshatra lets users stargaze without a backlit screen, using a black display and acoustic guidance to preserve night vision.

Problem

Most screen‑disconnection apps replace desk‑screen time with outdoor‑screen time, forcing users to look at a screen while outside.

Outcome

Nakshatra enables users to observe the night sky without a backlit screen, preserving retinal rhodopsin and providing acoustic and verbal guidance for star alignment.

Workflow

• 1. Hold phone flat at chest level and rotate torso; a 220‑440 Hz hum indicates alignment. 2. When heading aligns within 6° for 1 s, a chime plays and the app says, "Bring phone to your chin." 3. Raise phone to chin; the app whispers cues to tilt head up or down to match altitude within 3°. 4. When aligned, a confirmation tone plays, the screen stays black, and Google Gemma whispers star lore.
• 5. The app uses a gravity‑decomposition filter to detect linear acceleration, distinguishing walking from standing.
• 6. The system runs entirely in the browser, with a PWA that can be hosted locally via npm start --prefix client.
• 7. The app is open‑source under MIT and has 81 unit tests passing.
• 8. Users can access the live demo at https://IshekKhal.github.io/nakshatra.

Evidence

When you look at a smartphone in the dark, you encounter an immediate biological barrier. The human retina contains roughly 120 million rod photoreceptors that govern nocturnal night vision. These rods rely on a photopigment called rhodopsin. A single 500-millisecond glance at an illuminated smartphone screen bleaches over 80 percent of your retinal rhodopsin.

Source

Nakshatra is an eyes-up astronomical radar that runs inside the mobile browser. It does not display a virtual sky map. Its display is kept at 0.000 nits (solid #000000 on OLED panels) with low-intensity deep-red telemetry ($\lambda > 650\text{ nm}$) that preserves retinal rhodopsin.

Source

The system monitors the pitch axis and whispers natural physical cues: "Tilt your head up slightly" or "Lower your gaze a bit."

Source

Automated Test Suite: 81 unit tests passing across seven test suites in 1.3 seconds using the native Node.js test runner (npm test --prefix client).

Source