High-Level Project Summary
"The Sun Now" is an online visualizer that allows the user to visualize how the temperature of the sun changes with time. It incorporates an interactive slider where the user can drag the slider to simulate the passing of time, and then the corresponding temperature of the sun changes as shown in the text, and the background color of the sun changes as well.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
"The Sun Now" is an online visualizer that allows the user to visualize how the temperature of the sun changes with time. It incorporates an interactive slider where the user can drag the slider to simulate the passing of time, and then the corresponding temperature of the sun changes as shown in the text, and the background color of the sun changes as well. Alternatively, users can click "Show Another Time" to chose a randomized time, and the info of the sun along with the image will change as well. We also have a "What Am I Looking At?" tab on the top right corner that gives a detailed explanation of what is going on in the visualizer.
We acknowledge that the color of the images do not reflect the actual color of the plasma, and that they may have been captured in filtered white light or extreme ultraviolet light and translated into the visible spectrum so that we can see it with the human eye.
To build the website, we used HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The data was pulled from NOAA's data catalogue which tracks a rolling 7 day capture of solar wind data.
Further improvements that we envision can improve the project is that it automatically retrieves data from NOAA through an API, and to have website show a live update. Also, currently when we drag the slider, the whole background image changes, and occasionally there is a flicker which can be hard on the eye. Ideally, we would improve it so that it would just be the sun that changes color and in a gradual manner.
Space Agency Data
We used the plasma 7 day solar wind data from NOAA (linked in references section), specifically, we referenced the time and temperature data from the .json file. We realized that the average person may not realize that there are always solar activities going on, and we wanted to have a display that can help the users see it.
Hackathon Journey
We found that even finding the data that we can worth with was a little bit trouble some. Some data were in format that we don't have the technical skillset to work with, or they contain technical terms that we were not able to fully understand what they mean.
We chose this challenge because we wanted something that allows us to use our technical skills and creative abilities, as most of our team members only have limited coding experience. To address this issue, we split up the tasks amongst team members based on our abilities, and checked in with one another whenever we needed help.
In the end, we all improved our technical knowledge a bit with regards to coding, and all the backend and frontend knowledge that is needed in order to build a functional website display.
References
Images: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/
Data: https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-wind/plasma-7-day.json