Pow.js - Algorithmic sunburst generator via CSS, canvas and jQuery.

Yeah, it's probably the gratuitous secondary sunburst being drawn into the background of that demo page. That's a pretty big PNG image (i.e. the size of your viewport) being generated. For smaller uses it shouldn't be an issue, but gratuitous use will definitely cause performance problems.

I liked 100000 better.

It does more than just selecting an element. It also finds an inner element to do the burst from, grabs OuterWidth, and sets css.

While it is possible to do these without jQuery, you could say that about any jQ plugin.

originEl if present overrides originX/Y. It wouldn't be too hard to build a similar tool that absolutely positions a canvas within an element, but there's a tradeoff in complexity. Setting a CSS background is a nice, simple approach.