Im fact, if you zoom out all the way, you'll see that we're actually looking at a sphere from the outside, as if the stars are situated on a celestial globe. It seems to be a relatively common convention for interactive night-sky maps.
Inverting the Z axis purely as a UI quirk/implementation detail is one thing, but more interesting would be to embrace it as a means of representing the time scale of the universe - as you zoom into the earth, you zoom into the deeply redshifted ancient data, which conveniently is from a smaller universe so projecting it onto a smaller shell of the sphere makes sense. Until you reach the core, which is a picture of the cosmic background radiation.
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Im fact, if you zoom out all the way, you'll see that we're actually looking at a sphere from the outside, as if the stars are situated on a celestial globe. It seems to be a relatively common convention for interactive night-sky maps.
Inverting the Z axis purely as a UI quirk/implementation detail is one thing, but more interesting would be to embrace it as a means of representing the time scale of the universe - as you zoom into the earth, you zoom into the deeply redshifted ancient data, which conveniently is from a smaller universe so projecting it onto a smaller shell of the sphere makes sense. Until you reach the core, which is a picture of the cosmic background radiation.