Rise — Brain Cooler

the mechanism

The long horizon

Awe, the feeling of vastness that doesn't quite fit your usual frame, measurably expands how much time you feel you have, eases impatience, and lifts well-being.¹ A wide, slow horizon is one of the oldest ways to summon it.

So this does one thing, slowly: a sunrise that actually breaks. It starts before dawn and takes its time, the light computed in real time with the same Rayleigh and Mie scattering that makes real skies red at the edge and blue overhead.² And the stars it rises through are real: the bright-star catalogue projected over your coordinates, the same faint sky that thinned above you this morning.³ Nothing to do. Watch it arrive.

Rudd, Vohs & Aaker, Awe expands people's perception of time, Psychological Science, 2012.
Scattering model adapted from wwwtyro, glsl-atmosphere, MIT license.
Star positions: Yale Bright Star Catalogue (Hoffleit & Warren), via VizieR.

A single sky, never the same twice. About three and a half minutes.