Observatory

The Observatory turns your whole atrium history into a navigable night sky. Every workspace you've ever opened becomes a rotating galaxy; every agent session a star; every major commit a supernova. It's an ambient, explorable map of where your work has been — the kind of overview that's hard to feel from a list of folders.

Open it from the launcher (the Observatory tile, hotkey O). It's a full pane — the sky is the artifact, so there's no chrome competing with it. Your camera position is saved per pane, and a right-click offers Save image to export the current view as a PNG.

What the sky maps to

Nothing in the Observatory is decorative-only (except the deep-field backdrop). Each element is driven by real data:

Element

Maps to

Galaxy	A workspace. Its hue follows the workspace's accent color; its size and spin scale with activity.
Star	An agent session. Brighter and busier stars saw more tool calls and edits.
Supernova	A major commit.
Comet	A recent, still-active session, drawn with a trail.
Orbital satellite	A room inside a workspace.
Star cluster	A worktree — its sessions group together on one arm of the galaxy.
Pulsar	A frequently-edited file.
Wormhole	Two workspaces worked in tandem — strength tracks how much they co-occur.
Planet	A note orbiting its workspace.
Nebula	A workspace's adapter mix, glowing brighter when a session is live.

A parallax starfield and distant galaxies sit behind everything as a stationary backdrop, moving at depth-based rates as you pan.

Live vs. ambient motion

The Observatory deliberately separates texture from activity so a glance tells you whether anything is actually happening:

• Ambient — galaxies turn slowly and stars twinkle at a constant, low frequency. This is the resting state; it reads as texture, not events.
• Live — when a workspace has an active agent session, its galaxy spins faster, its live stars pulse on a distinct heartbeat cadence, and a soft halo blooms at the galaxy's center. The heartbeat is reserved for live activity alone, so it's unmistakable.

If you have Reduce Motion enabled in macOS, ambient motion freezes and only the static brightness cues remain.

Inspecting a workspace

Click a galaxy to focus the camera on it and open a detail panel. It summarizes that workspace at a glance:

• Name, custom icon, dormancy status, and when it was last active.
• Project directory and the date of its first session ("born").
• Totals: session count, total active time, distinct files touched, skills invoked.
• Adapter mix — the top adapters by share (e.g. Claude Code 67%, Codex 28%, Gemini 5%).
• Top files — the most-touched files with hit counts.
• Commits — major and total commit counts, and how long ago the last one landed.

Scrubbing the timeline

Bring your cursor near the bottom edge to reveal a timeline strip, then drag the playhead to travel back through the year — sessions newer than the playhead fade away as you rewind. atrium auto-surfaces the moments worth jumping to as markers along the strip:

• Marathon sessions — your longest single sittings.
• Supernova commits — the major ones.
• Big days — when you touched the most files.
• Births — the first session in a workspace.
• Wakes — the first session after a long dormancy.
• Switch storms — days you bounced across many workspaces.

The soundscape

The Observatory can hum. Audio is off by default; toggle it with the speaker button in the top-right corner (or mute it globally from the toolbar). When on:

• An ambient drone gives each workspace a voice tuned to an A-minor pentatonic scale, stereo-panned to where its galaxy sits on screen.
• Per-event chimes fire as activity happens, inheriting each workspace's spatial position.
• Two sliders — Drone and Events — mix the ambient bed against the chimes independently. A master ceiling keeps it gentle, and zooming out pulls the volume down with you.

The audio mix is app-scoped, so it keeps playing as you move between panes.

Controls

• Zoom — mouse wheel.
• Rotate — click and drag the sky.
• Focus — click any object to glide the camera to it; clicking a galaxy also opens its detail panel and plays that workspace's short signature phrase.
• Save image — right-click → Save image (PNG).

Where this fits

The Observatory is the wide-angle, ambient view of your history. For the chronological, readable account of a single workspace, see the Timeline; for what agents are doing right now, see the Activity sidebar.