Recently I found the original source for the SGI Twilight wallpaper, and thought it would be fun to have a modern version available for systems I use. Right now, my primary monitor is an Apple Studio Display which runs at a native 5K resolution, so I was hoping I could make it at least that size.

The original source code has been made available as part of the SGI demos repository. In short order, I was able to put together a new version of this file that rather than running as an executable generates a PNG. This PNG has been scaled to 5K resolution, with some minor changes to make stars render at 2x scale as well.

The updated C program to generate an image is available on GitHub if you’d like to modify it for additional resolutions or configurations.

Twilight 5K wallpaper
Click to download the full resolution image.

As an aside, Apple’s “Solar Gradients” wallpaper seems at least partially inspired by Twilight.