There’s this photo that’s been sitting on my inspiration board for a while, of the space shuttle Endeavour, suspended in space in low Earth orbit at sunset. It shows Earth’s upper atmosphere as a backdrop, featuring beautiful, colorful layers ranging from dark orange to blue before fading away into the deep black of space. Not only is that gradient of color aesthetically pleasing, but the phenomenon behind those colors, atmospheric scattering , is even more of an interesting topic once you start looking into how it works and how to reproduce it. Shuttle Silhouette https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/shuttle-silhouette-2/ I wanted to build my own version of this effect with shaders, rendering the sky’s distinctive blue color and realistic sunsets and sunrises directly in the browser. The goal was to get as close as I could to that photo, while also moving toward the kind of atmospheric rendering often seen in games and other shader-based media.…