The biggest update since launch — NearLight has a completely new interface! • New "Mission Dock": all controls now live in one compact bar at the bottom — time, mission and view clearly separated. The 3D scene is finally all yours. • Data on demand: destination, travel and physics data slide in as a side drawer when you need them — and get out of the way when you don't. • Cinema mode: one tap on the eye hides the entire interface. • Collect every world: each unvisited destination carries a blue dot — completing a journey clears it for good. Can you clear them all? • The real night sky: the star map now shows NASA's Milky Way panorama, astronomically aligned — every star sits in front of its actual patch of sky. • Milky Way: a more organic look with dust filaments and glow — and seen edge-on it darkens realistically like a real galaxy. • Black holes: every pick from the catalog gets a fresh cinematic framing — viewing angle, tilt and proximity vary like movie shots. • Finer time control in the Solar System: 15 steps from real-time up to 1 year/second, plus a quick calendar picker. • Instant tab switching: scenes and camera positions are preserved. • Plus: fixed audio dropouts, iPad stability improvements and lower energy use.

The Milky Way got a major makeover. • Photo-matched galaxy — the galaxy view was rebuilt to resemble a real face-on spiral: hundreds of thousands of stars tracing the arms, bright blue-white clusters, glowing pink star-forming regions, and a warm golden core. • Dust lanes — dark, gently curved dust lanes now weave through the spiral arms, giving the disc real depth as you orbit and fly through it. • Softer glow, calmer motion — a gentle interstellar glow fills the disc and fades as you dive inside, and the galaxy now spins more slowly and smoothly. Also improved: the Milky Way tab opens instantly again, no more brief flash when picking a destination, and the spaceship now correctly disappears when you stop a travel simulation.

This update polishes the Black Hole Sim and fixes the Interstellar layout on iPad. • Doppler Beaming: a new slider tilts the disc's brightness and colour to one side — the part rotating towards you turns brighter and blue-white, the part rotating away dims and reddens. • A bright photon ring now hugs the event horizon, correctly hidden behind the accretion disc. • Get much closer: the camera can now descend almost all the way down to the horizon. • Richer, deeper-red disc colours and more organic, swirling smoke. • Sharper and faster: anti-aliasing plus adaptive resolution keep the black hole crisp on every device at a smooth 60 fps. • Fixed faint radial "spokes" across the disc and the jagged outer-rim edge. • iPad (landscape): the Interstellar side panel now scrolls, and the Destination Data panel no longer covers the Travel Mode controls.

Added - Background music — three looping space-ambience tracks with rewind / mute / skip controls. Small audio panel at the top of the collapsible left column on Mac/iPad; a fold-out audio window via a speaker button on iPhone. One sound effect is exclusive to the Black Hole Sim. Playback is user-initiated (no auto-start). - Black Hole Sim camera controls — pinch / trackpad-magnify to change Observer Distance (zoom), right-mouse-drag to tilt the disc (roll) - Zoom-out range at the black hole was doubled so it fits fully in an iPhone-portrait viewport. Changed - Solar System orbit insertion reworked — arriving at a planet or moon is now one continuous fly-by capture: the ship matches the destination's orbital velocity, swings around it, and settles into a geostationary orbit in the body's own spin direction - Black Hole Sim camera roll now eases out with inertia and rotates in the natural direction. - Small UI changes Fixed - Milky Way onboard view — fixed a black rectangle flashing over the galactic core during coast - Solar System turn-around (no coast) — in g-mode with the coast slider at zero, the ship now completes its 180° flip before the De-Accel point and brakes already facing the right way. - Black Hole Sim observer distance — the camera now sits where the readout says: "at the event horizon" in the panel means visually at the horizon, and the closest approach adapts to the black hole's spin

What's New in 1.3.0 • The black hole, rebuilt from the ground up The Black Hole Simulation now runs on a brand-new native metal renderer. It bends light around the black hole in real time — gravitational lensing, a glowing accretion disc with relativistic Doppler beaming, bloom and cinematic tone-mapping — and it now works reliably on every supported iPhone and iPad, including devices where it previously couldn't start. • Brighter, more vivid accretion discs Every black hole in the catalogue now shows a brighter, richer disc, making the differences between them easier to see. • A cleaner, more consistent interface Polished the dark theme and the in-app info panels across all tabs, and fixed a display issue where some text could be hard to read on certain devices.

- Small Hotfix for route calculation in Solar System - Route line is properly hidden behind planets it passes behind. - Energy readout in Unlimited mode now holds steady during flight. - Black Hole Sim shows a clearer message on older devices that can't run the WebGL renderer.

Polish & comfort release. • Pluto is now in the Solar System with its real orbit, current position and tipped-over axial spin. • Realistic axial tilt for every planet and major moon — Earth 23.4°, Saturn 26.7° with its rings, Uranus on its side, retrograde Venus and Triton, all driven by real obliquity data. • New Follow cameras for Solar System and Interstellar (and a rebuilt one in Milky Way): drag to orbit the travel ship, scroll to zoom, with the view always kept on the ship. • Solar System "Reset View" button swings the camera back to the selected destination, and trips now launch from a parking orbit outside Earth so the ship no longer flies out through the planet. • Milky Way route line and ring markers thin down as you fly close so they stop hiding the travel ship; the travel ship itself is now properly opaque against the bright galactic backdrop. The habitat wheel responds to the speed slider in both modes. • Several smaller fixes: Mac rotate dead-zone, Solar System coast-phase engines, Interstellar arrival pose, Milky Way Reset View, Black Hole Sim Earth clock no longer races or rewinds when you move the Observer Distance slider, label collisions on close binary stars, iPhone landscape icon. App now opens on Solar System.

NEW TABS • Solar System — a Kepler-accurate 3D Sun, 8 planets and 8 major moons on real JPL orbits. Fly a simulation from Earth to any body with a far-side orbit capture, scrub the date, and read live cruise speed, remaining distance and energy. • Milky Way — a procedurally generated spiral galaxy at realistic scale (~100,000 ly, ~300,000 stars). Tap anywhere to plot a route from Sol and compute its relativistic travel times. 3D SPACESHIP & TRAVEL SIMULATION • A detailed spaceship now flies your route in every tab — nose-first, four engine flames, a spinning habitat ring. • Real Play / Pause / Stop; watch the ship accelerate, coast and brake. • Three onboard cameras plus a relativistic cockpit view at near-light speed: aberration, Doppler shift, beaming and camera shake. BIGGER, RICHER DATA • The catalogue grew from 2,456 to 8,151 real stars out to 1,000 light-years, with matching exoplanet host data. • Travel Times now add Earth & contracted distance, the Lorentz factor, peak speed and the estimated energy needed. • New Coast Phase for a realistic accelerate-coast-brake profile. BLACK HOLE SIM • Orbital time dilation shown next to the stationary value — reproduces the Interstellar 1 hour = 7 years scenario near a spinning black hole. EVERYWHERE • Now a native app on Mac, iPad and iPhone (was iPhone-only), still fully offline — no account, no tracking.