High-Level Project Summary
Bright Ideas utilizes augmented reality to create Instagram filters, with which you could experience how the brightness of a star changes along with other planetary objects.Also, this project aims to promote the awareness of astronomy by using social media such as Instagram combined with science materials in a simple, trendy and interesting way. We constructed the Instagram filters based on the simulation data of lightcurve and batman packages, which can be used to simulate the changes of the brightness due to the transit of planets. And we tried to access the data of the GCVS and Gaia data set to develop the dashboard on the web to visualize the changes of variable brightness.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Learning flowchart of our target audience:
Our target could be separated into two parts:
1.「Bright Have Fun」fun facts spreading
(1)twinkle, twinkle, wink
This is an Instagram filter that applies augmented reality, using three-dimensional space design to show the relationship between planets and stars. In visual effects, one of the reasons why the stars will twinkle is because of the occlusion of light caused by the orbiting of planets. The planet makes a shadow on the star when passing it. This filter is used to simulate this kind of situation.
▲illustration diagram of the filter
▲the program coding by SPARK AR
The design of twinkle, twinkle, wink not only simplifies the complicated knowledge of astronomy but also could make it go viral by the reposting and imitation of social effects. And it will induce discussion between the people, to achieve the goal to spread knowledge like a virus.
(2)Dashboard - Data Visualization
To visualize the changes of stars’ brightness caused by different reasons, we tried to develop a dashboard on the website page to show the data of the different situations of the twinkling of stars. Although we cannot see the slight changes with the bare eye, this dashboard could help us to understand the changes of the stars better.
▲design concept
▲combination of two python packages: lightkurve and streamlit
2.Disperse the popular science
After we raise the awareness of astronomical knowledge to the public, making hay while the sun shines is important. Thus, a website and Instagram posts sharing articles about the stars could raise people’s enthusiasm to astronomical science by simple words with the illustrations and pictures, making people enjoy the process of learning astronomical knowledge.
(1) Instagram posts of the popular science
Instagram is a well-known social media which could spread the information fast and widely around the world. We tried to combine the Instagram posts and filters we mentioned above to increase the awareness of science knowledge. Because of the characteristics of Instagram posts, we share interesting scientific facts on different topics. And they are presented in pictures, illustrations and text descriptions to satisfy everyone’s curiosity of the space.
(2) website articles
Compared to Instagram posts, the form of a website page has less limitations. We will upload the articles by different topics. The link of the website will be attached to the posts to improve exposure in social media.
(3) Star Easy Talk Forum
We developed a website forum for everyone to share any aspect of astronomy. Also, experts would be invited to answer the questions. We hope the forum will bring innovation by the exchanges of different ideas.
(4) Associated Websites
If the above resources cannot fulfill the desire of the knowledge, the related pages links could be found on this page. In these pages, more learning resources about the topics could be found.
Space Agency Data
Lightkurve and batman
lightkurve and batman are python packages which can be used to simulate the brightness changes of transits of planets. lightkurve needs to process the Kepler data. The data is used to develop the Instagram filters and the interactive dashboard.
GCVS (General Catalog of Variables Stars)
GCVS provides the list of the variables.
Gaia
Gaia is a European space mission providing the data of the stars in the Milky way. This dataset along with GCVS is used to develop the interactive dashboard, showing the changes of brightness of the stars by visualization.
Hackathon Journey
Our team consists of people from different ages and fields. This teamwork helped us to promote the hard and soft skills in different areas. Firstly, after two days of learning, our hard skills such as website making, astronomy knowledge and software applications did improve a lot even though we barely understood some of this knowledge beforehand. Secondly, speaking of soft skills, we faced a huge challenge to cooperate with each member because of the differences in fields between us and also we never met each other in real life. Although the cooperation is difficult, we found a balance between us by communication, tack assignment and finding something in common to make it work eventually.
References
Tags
#star, #knowledge, #twinkle, #dashboard