Astrophel Team

Managua | Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Aelius Viewer

High-Level Project Summary

Our main idea is to make people think the stars are cool! The purpose of this visualizer is to contemplate how the star Betelgeuse presented a change over the years, since this process is usually too slow or too small for the human eye to recognize. We have developed this learning tool to help people have a better understanding of celestial objects!

Link to Final Project

https://astrophelteam.wixsite.com/aelius-viewer

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtu.be/3Aj0qWOpXE4

Detailed Project Description

We have developed a website containing a 3D model made on Blender, and some fun facts for people to familiarize themselves with star variability and different factors that affect how we perceive celestial objects from our planet. The project emerged from the notion of when NASA scientists noticed via the Hubble telescope that the star “Betelgeuse” was dying, to then discover it wasn't; in fact, it turned out to be just a nebula, a cloud of dust, passing by. The main purpose of the website is to show users a fun way to visualize the diminution of the brightness of stars and why sometimes we believe we see them fading out.

Our project solves our selected problem “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, due to the fact that we managed to show real NASA data in a creative way, focusing on one star, demonstrating rare events that doesn't occur commonly, while also combining real and simulated information for our model and explaining how it varies and why.

Space Agency Data

We used as a reference some data collected from the Rosetta satellite (https://sci.esa.int/web/rosetta/-/54728-shape-model-of-comet-67p)

While also being inspired by the NASA 3D resources, so that way we could make our visual source more realistic (https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/).

Hackathon Journey

We experienced a lot of ups and downs in the journey of completing the NASA 2022 Space Apps challenge. Our team, Astrophel, is composed of 2 seniors, and 2 sophomores; all of us in High School and with different backgrounds. Even though we approached this challenge with absolutely no experience in programming or 3D modeling, and not knowing what to expect from this wonderful event, at the end of it, we are proud to admit we have gained a lot of valuable knowledge that will always stay with us!.

It was the first time for us, as a group, participating in an international event. It was exciting, yet stressful. Working as a team is really helpful for producing work in such a short length of time, since we all have different mindsets we can share new wonderful ideas. Furthermore, we would like to extend our gratitude and appreciation to the Universal School Pierre and Marie Curie, for making us feel comfortable with the workspaces they provided.