A walk across the Black Rock Desert toward the Temple, under the sky that is over it now. Nothing here is a picture of the place. As far as numbers go, it is the place.
The sky is a physical model of the air: Rayleigh, Mie, ozone and the playa's own shallow dust, with the light that scatters twice and more counted in, which is what a horizon needs to stop falling away and a dust storm needs to come out white. It is baked afresh each time the Sun moves.
The Sun and the Moon are where they stand at this minute over Black Rock City, from Meeus, and the Moon shows its real near side and its real phase. The stars are the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 8404 of them to the naked-eye limit, and the planets are among them.
The mountains are the real skyline of the desert, measured from the playa out of elevation data, so the ranges hide the Sun some twenty minutes before a flat horizon would, and the light lingers on the tops.
The cloud is the cloud over the playa at this hour. GOES-West looks down on this same sky every ten minutes; its infrared says where cloud stands and how high, and by day the visible band says how thick. The picture is half an hour old by the time it arrives and is moved on by the wind at each height, then drawn as a volume with the Sun followed into it. When there is no picture, the forecast's cover shapes the sky instead.
The Temple is a hexagram of twelve helical blades, every measure derived from the figure: inner is to outer as outer is to height, one to root three to three. Its skin is a honeycomb of timber, six cells across the blade at every height, and the light is traced through the frame. It is made after the Temple at Black Rock City, which is built of timber and burns on the last night.
The clock is the real instant on the playa. To see another hour, add it to the address: theplaya.net/?t=2026-08-25T19:45 winds the sky to a sunset in August, with the cloud that was over the playa that evening.
The walk is the only pace. Hold the mouse button to walk and drag to steer; a drag with the right button looks without walking. On a phone, one finger walks and steers, two look. There is nothing to do but arrive.
Credits. three.js r169, MIT. The Yale Bright Star Catalogue. Lunar albedo map by the NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio, from LROC. Wood from Poly Haven, CC0. Elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles, derived from USGS 3DEP. Weather from Open-Meteo, CC BY 4.0. Satellite: GOES-West ABI bands 2 and 13, NOAA, via NASA GIBS. The page asks the network for the weather and the pictures and for nothing else, and it runs the same without them.
If the walk gave you something, the gift box in the other corner keeps the building going.