Three devices carry the whole atlas
No floating cards, no neon flood. Every screen is built from the same considered system — a spine, a registration, a measured baseline.
The binding spine
Each module carries a recessed gutter with its plate code set vertically, as if torn from a bound volume — the unit of the atlas is the page, never the widget.
Registration marks
Corner fiducial crosses register every plate to the press. They mean alignment — the same crosses a printer used to seat a plate true on the bed.
The measured rule
A ticked scale bar paces the page. It is the catalogue's heartbeat: ticks tighten inside data, open up between spreads, and never collapse to empty space.
An institute does not photograph the sky. It edits it — one plate, one caption, one measured rule at a time.— Ephemeris, founding note
Filed this observing run
A contact sheet of the catalogue, hung on one baseline. Each plate is indexed, registered, and ready for the register.
Drift veil, sector 9
A slow ionised drift crossing the meridian field at the violet edge.
Probe 9, recovered
Re-acquired against catalogue stars after eleven nights dark.
Tidal accord line
Third reading of the accord band; emission resolved and filed.