The architecture is one experience, not a sequence of pages. The visitor lands on a specimen, held in a stage that reveals the underlying data as the visitor interacts.

Twelve instruments, one per stage of the canonical journey. Each instrument is a window into the data. Selecting an instrument deepens the view. The selection persists in the URL. The selection is visible in every other instrument that references the same identity.

The full sequence is present in HTML without JavaScript. The default density is rendered. The selection, the depth, and the cross-instrument highlighting are layered on top by the SelectionController. The JavaScript-free fallback is the same authored work without synchronization.

For each stage, the instrument exposes:

• Overview density — the major transformation. One paragraph. The artifact dominates the visual.
• Technical density — the contracts, the constraints, the layouts, the search results, the rejected alternatives.
• Raw-artifact density — the manifest, the receipt, the digest, the hardware identity, the schema version, the provenance.

The visitor can step through the stages in order. The visitor can select a non-adjacent stage. The visitor can return to the previous selection by URL.

The twelve stages, with their default one-sentence description at overview density:

1. Source package ingest. A model package arrives with its metadata.
2. Graph recovery and declaration. Prism recovers the canonical graph under a declared schema, operator semantics, and normalization policy.
3. Region decomposition. The graph is decomposed into logical tensors, semantic regions, and structural priors.
4. Representation search. Prism evaluates candidate representations.
5. Target constraints. Prism applies legality for the named hardware.
6. Admitted compilation plan. A plan is committed as durable state.
7. ComputeImage realization. The plan is materialized into a .cimage.
8. Constitutional transaction. A request enters through a typed command.
9. Residency and placement. The runtime assigns the request to lanes.
10. Backend execution. Provider kernels run.
11. Output and receipt. A typed receipt is emitted.
12. Replay, comparison, and promotion. The receipt and the events around it are replayable.

The v1 Observatory exposes the published specimen. Selecting stage 1 opens the source orientation. Selecting stage 7 opens the six strata. Selecting stage 8 opens a one-line statement: "No constitutional transaction has been emitted to publishable storage in the v1 corpus." Stages 9–12 are similarly gap-stated. Stages 4, 5, 6 expose the search trace, the legalization report field (absent), and the plan field (absent) of the published specimen.

The Observatory is honest about what it can show. The instrument panel is fully present; the data behind it is whatever the corpus has.

The selection state is addressable. A URL of the form /observatory/life/?stage=7&density=technical&tensor=weight restores on reload. The SelectionController parses, validates, normalizes, writes, and broadcasts. The instruments subscribe.

The selection is the URL. The animation is a visual consequence. The visitor can link to a particular stage, tensor, capability, or receipt. A reviewer who wants to point at a particular view points at a URL.