The Invisible (見えないもの), a pop-up book

The Invisible (『見えないもの』) is the second book in his library at chaipat.cc: a pop-up picture book about his seven months as a research assistant at NARIT, from April to October 2026. It follows the shape of Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince: a journey across small planets, each with one inhabitant, and each standing for one part of the work.

The planets

The book is bound along the top and lies open on a desk at night, with stiff board pages that turn upward. On each opening a paper planet and its inhabitant stand up from the lower page. The upper page holds the story and one research figure, shown as a round plate, as if seen through an eyepiece.

The last opening is about what cannot be seen by eye, and only appears by counting, smoothing and searching.

The figures

Every figure is loaded straight from the research archive at archive.chaipat.cc, and carries its record id, so the archive stays the single source. When a figure cannot load, the eyepiece shows a field of stars instead.

The book tells the experience of the research, not its results. The work itself is clustering for galactic merger histories and faint stellar structure detection, and a paper on it is in preparation.

How it is built

The paper planets, their scenes and their inhabitants are drawn as SVG by Python scripts, from one palette. The text of each planet, and which figure its eyepiece shows, live in one text file in Japanese and English. The page turning is plain JavaScript and CSS.

See also

• The library
• Kate (糧), a stitch-bound book and Nenrin (年輪), a picture scroll, the other books
• National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT)

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