Jones/Paranal Physical-Visibility Research Quarantine

Date: 2026-08-07 Status: quarantined; not an engine, API, data-pack, release, or roadmap dependency

Decision

The site-specific Jones/Paranal scattered-moonlight experiment is removed from the active Moira physical-visibility product path. It is not part of clear_sky_naked_eye_point_source_v1, the public Python or REST contract, the packaged compatibility resources, or the Phase 7 release gate.

This decision does not invalidate the source audit or the research questions. It recognizes that the attempted Paranal composition was an optional experimental branch, not a prerequisite for releasing the already admitted general physical-visibility model.

Active boundary after quarantine

• The engine continues to use the immutable external moira-physical-heliacal-visibility 1.2.0 pack.
• The opt-in single-epoch assessment and four-phase event contracts remain unchanged.
• Legacy visibility and heliacal defaults remain unchanged.
• General atmosphere, directional background, horizon, observer-factor, spectral-response, threshold, event-solver, and typed-receipt work remains active.
• No Jones component loader, Paranal scenario, 1.3 compatibility contract, environment variable, public type, public function, or response field is shipped.

Removed from the active worktree

The quarantined scope includes the experimental moonlight runtime module, Jones component-pack and Paranal scenario builders and validators, failed and interrupted response-geometry artifacts, experiment-only tests, the draft 1.3 compatibility contract, and the tentative public/facade/REST integration.

The pre-quarantine state is preserved outside the repository at:

C:\Users\nilad\Documents\Codex\2026-07-25\m\recovery\moira-physical-visibility-pre-paranal-quarantine-2026-08-07.zip

Archive SHA-256: b2d0debc26126618c68c94959a188ae304547c1c150c97edb590d239abea6182.

The archive contains all 157 files that were modified or untracked before the quarantine cleanup. It is recovery evidence, not a release artifact.

Reopening rule

This work must not silently return as a Phase 7 prerequisite. Reopening it requires a separately authorized research project with a new model identity, a bounded scientific question, an explicit stop condition, source-owned validation, and a release decision independent of the current physical model. Until then, historical Jones/Paranal checkpoints are research history only and must not be described as admitted product capability.

Phase 7 restart point

Phase 7 returns to the core release boundary: regenerate the public capability and API inventories from current runtime truth, validate the exact 1.2.0 external pack, build and clean-install the wheel and sdist offline, rerun the independent event oracles and regression gates, and record the resulting release receipt. No site-specific moonlight scenario is required for closure.