Crab Pulsar with Claude Code (Opus 5.5, max effort)

I'd like you to create a video showing what a neutron star like the Crab Pulsar would look like if you were, say, a 500 miles away from it, or maybe 1,000 miles: close enough to see the detail of what's happening. Take all the time you need, and ask me any questions you have."

\- Then I gave feedback after each version. There were four in the end. For example: make it cinematic rather than educational, open on the real Chandra image, use a less AI-sounding voice, make the surface solid, and do a genuinely close pass.

\- Claude wrote its own renderer in Python and PyTorch, running on my RTX 4090. Every pixel's light ray is traced through the star's gravity, and it tested this against an exact solver.

\- It rendered the film at 4K and 60 fps in 10-second chunks, then joined them with ffmpeg.

\- The narration is text-to-speech made on my PC (Chatterbox), with Whisper checking that every line came out word-perfect. The music was synthesised in code.

\- It kept a sources file saying whether each number is measured (for example, Jodrell Bank's timing data for the spin), assumed or derived.

\- It checked its own work by looking at the rendered frames.



Codex vs Claude

I also asked Codex (GPT-6 Astra on max) to make one, to compare: [https://youtu.be/NLYXqp21-IA](https://youtu.be/NLYXqp21-IA)

Claude saw Codex's versions a few times along the way, so it's not a strict head-to-head. Which do you like more?



Inspiration: Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, episode 3 "Falling", from 32:29: [https://youtu.be/pGxyFOTUPZE?t=1949](https://youtu.be/pGxyFOTUPZE?t=1949)

Opening images: Chandra X-ray Observatory, November 2000 to April 2001 (NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al.).