Nebula HDR screensaver
• Dust lanes carve dark channels through the clouds, and dense foreground dust now reaches real opacity, cutting silhouettes out of the star field behind it
• The gas is filamentary instead of billowing — masses gather into streamers and sheets rather than round lumps
• The brightest stars light the gas they sit in, with a blue-white reflection glow that only appears where there is cloud to scatter it
• The camera reads the sky ahead
The palette centres on deep violet and indigo, with magenta and cool-blue accents. Foreground masses occlude background stars with true depth. Dense star clusters glow as pointillistic distant galaxies, and the brightest stars throw subtle aperiodic HDR flares with four-point diffraction spikes.
A split-resolution pipeline keeps stars pin-sharp at native resolution while the gas runs at an adaptive lower resolution. Each screensaver activation randomises the camera path, nebula formation, and star field so no two sessions look alike.
Features:
- Volumetric raymarching through a 3D noise field
- HDR output with automatic SDR fallback
- Configurable render resolution, frame rate, and zoom speed
- Burn-in safe: every element moves or cross-fades, so no pixel holds a static image
- No network access, no ads, no tracking
Optimized for the NVIDIA Shield and HDR displays, but runs on any Android phone or TV with a sufficiently powerful GPU.
- Author: Jordan Adema
- License: GNU General Public License v3.0 only
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Versions
Although APK downloads are available below to give you the choice, you should be aware that by installing that way you will not receive update notifications and it's a less secure way to download. We recommend that you install the F-Droid client and use that.
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This version requires Android 5.0 or newer.
It is built and signed by the original developer, and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball.
Download APK 205 KiB PGP Signature | Build Log
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This version requires Android 5.0 or newer.
It is built and signed by the original developer, and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball.
Download APK 197 KiB PGP Signature | Build Log
-
This version requires Android 5.0 or newer.
It is built and signed by the original developer, and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball.
Download APK 121 KiB PGP Signature | Build Log
• On SDR screens the faint floor now settles to true black instead of a slightly lifted grey, with a light contrast lift so gas masses separate more cleanly
• HDR output is unchanged
• Nebulas fill the frame more often instead of drifting to bare starfield, and their faint outer gas reads instead of fading to black
• The bright edge that defines a nebula mass is wider, more textured, and less regularly shaped — mottled gas rather than a thin bright ribbon
• Showpiece galaxies are skipped entirely when none is in view, and the distant star layer stops twinkling — the reclaimed frame time goes into gas resolution
• Finer zoom slider (20% per