Physical Heliacal Visibility - Next-Release Notes

Status: superseded by wiki/03_release/RELEASE_NOTES_6.2.0.md. Phase 7 is included in Moira 6.2.0.

Outcome

Moira now has an additive, opt-in physical point-source visibility family that keeps atmospheric, visual-threshold, target, event, and error evidence visible. It does not replace the legacy limiting-magnitude/arcus-visionis default.

The named composite model is immutable:

clear_sky_naked_eye_point_source_v1

Its two public operations are:

• a single-epoch physical visibility assessment; and
• a four-phase first/last physical event search using explicit morning/evening and rising/setting semantics.

Both operations are available through their owning Python module, curated root exports, facade functions, matching Moira methods, strict REST models, and dedicated OpenAPI operations:

POST /v1/visibility/physical-assessment
POST /v1/visibility/physical-event

Scientific and data boundary

The admitted runtime resource is the separately distributed pack:

pack: moira-physical-heliacal-visibility
version: 1.2.0
manifest SHA-256:
  cf93433a9f66a5ea92832271ce3c4b023fcc8693164803539a9f1be85b17468c
license: CC BY-SA 4.0

The MIT moira-astro distribution contains the compatibility contracts, release identity, and resource notice. It does not contain the external numerical payload, libRadtran, REPTRAN source/data, CIE source tables, or a downloader. A caller supplies VisibilityDataPackConfig; a server operator uses:

• MOIRA_SERVER_PHYSICAL_VISIBILITY_DATA_PACK_DIRECTORY; and
• optionally MOIRA_SERVER_PHYSICAL_VISIBILITY_DATA_PACK_MANIFEST_SHA256.

Normal execution remains offline. Missing, corrupt, incompatible, unexpected, or out-of-domain evidence returns a typed failure rather than an extrapolated or fabricated answer.

Admitted targets and phases

• Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are admitted for single-epoch assessment inside their source-owned photometric/spectral domains.
• Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Sirius are admitted for all four physical event phases.
• Mercury and Venus event search fails closed as body_phase_not_admitted because required guard days can leave their admitted phase-angle domains.
• Other fixed stars and target families remain unadmitted until their photometry and spectral treatment have independent receipts.

Validation

The Phase 7 capability matrix names the evidence class for every admitted claim. The release boundary includes:

• primary-source equation checks;
• independent libRadtran holdouts excluded from LUT fitting;
• the Tousey-Koomen Table I bounded observational comparison;
• property and event-ownership invariants;
• legacy compatibility fixtures;
• public-object identity, serializer, REST, and OpenAPI parity;
• a predeclared 16-cell DE441/pack-bound event matrix spanning every admitted target and phase: 12 independently reconstructed event times and 4 explicit typed no-event/domain regressions;
• separate source-solver, storage, interpolation, root, magnitude-envelope, and event-time sensitivity receipts;
• exact Python/native differentials for the two private Phase 6 kernels; and
• deterministic external-pack archiving, wheel/sdist inspection, sdist reconstruction, two clean installs, native imports, exact pack loads, and an active socket-deny guard.

Historical apparition windows and the Sirius/Sothic case remain bounded legacy corroboration. They are not presented as exact physical-model event truth.

The broad event oracle uses 40 checksum-bound one-minute NASA/JPL Horizons files, the pinned Hipparcos/Astropy Sirius path, and a validator that imports neither Moira nor its event solver. All 12 timed comparisons pass the fixed 60-second external-grid limit; the worst absolute difference is 5.879 seconds. The four negative cells are not relabeled as event-time oracles. A separate live replay executes all 16 cells through the public engine, including the 35-60 day no-transition/domain searches.

The exact 5,311-byte acquisition-time matrix is preserved separately from the later admitted release-policy matrix. Its SHA-256, ba061013c6e6258475baab4442b072c82c887aabc840cc19f5b0126542eb9323, matches the archived JPL source manifest, and governance rejects any drift in their shared acquisition-driving fields. A verified external recovery archive preserves all 47 source files under a source-controlled identity receipt. The engine replay and published runtime require neither NumPy nor Astropy; the pinned Astropy/ERFA Sirius reconstruction remains isolated development-only authority validation.

Native boundary

Phase 6 moved only two dense numerical operations to the required native extension:

• spectral response-weight resolution; and
• direct-extinction interpolation.

Python still owns doctrine, model and resource admission, policy, invalid-domain handling, typed status/reasons, event ownership, solver orchestration, receipts, and public result construction. The Python numerical paths remain executable differential oracles.

Explicit exclusions

This release candidate does not claim support for clouds, live weather, telescopic or extended-object visibility, direct solar visibility, lunar crescent visibility through this point-source model, a global airglow model, observer-population probability, or synthetic confidence.

The Jones/Paranal moonlight experiment is quarantined research. It is absent from the runtime, public API, packaged compatibility resources, release gate, and active roadmap; it is not a prerequisite for this release.

Performance boundary

The private kernels pass their differential and microbenchmark admissions. The representative first and warm assessment budgets pass. The recorded Jupiter and Sirius event-search timing targets remain red and are documented as performance limitations, not scientific or contract failures. No approximate geometry, profile binning, or policy migration was admitted to conceal them.

Downstream publication

Website documentation is intentionally not part of this engine Phase 7 change. It may be updated only after an exact engine release artifact and the matching external data-pack artifact are published and verified.