Hesperia Quasar

Madrid | Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

“Hesperia Quasar”

High-Level Project Summary

The challenge consists of the development of a tool to help people learn about stellar variability by providing an enjoyable and educational experience on how and why the stars in the night sky change.The tool developed is a mobile application that enables the user to learn by playing, by ‘feeling’ the stars’ activity. It is an inclusive application for disabled people as we have included sounds that come from real scientific data.This application serves for a double purpose:· On the one hand, the application provides access to users to the knowledge of the stars’· On the other hand, it is living learning with a full sensorial experience on the knowledge gained.

Link to Final Project

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Onw_arHOflHQQfNV-8i5J_9LkAL5UZ6i/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113777108204271726466&rtpof=true&sd=true

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Bx50uV4HZ-oSokNlJ3DquSU7Wv0j0p7/view?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

The mission is to make wisdom accessible and enjoyable for all with the focus on the stellar variability. This application aims to raise the curiosity and understanding of the world above us and beyond our sky.

Through the application, users get the space on their hand and can experience the brightness changes of the stars at night. The variations of stellar brightness may require a long time to happen, even decades. The application accelerates these changes to show how they happen in just seconds.

The tool represents changes that are invisible for the human eyes, because of the huge distances and long period twinkle durations. The variability is as well converted into audio (and vibration) to widen the experience through the hearing sense to be more immersive and inclusive for some users.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt became the host in this journey for the user as she is the best placed to share the knowledge she got through all her work in the field back in the early 1900s.

The application is a piece of software which would mainly run on smartphones, and it would be developed using open source development tools and web technologies (to be able to easily port it to computers and other devices).

As there is not enough time to develop a complete software in less than two days, we worked on a web application demo based on predefined interactions. For its preparation, different programming languages have been used for different purposes:

· Light curves are downloaded and analysed using Python and the public ‘lightkurve’ library (Kepler & TESS time series analysis, by Lightkurve Collaboration). Then sound files are created with the public ‘sonipy’ library (Scatterplot Sonification Package, by Locke Patton and Emily Levesque).

· Processing language (Java based) is used to load the clean curves and the audio files, generated in the previous step, and create animations which show the curve and a circle (star) that varies its brightness following the one of the curve.

All of those resources are integrated in a mockup demonstration with Proto.io prototyping platform.

Space Agency Data

 To be able to plot the different variable stars of the night sky projection, we need to query the “General Catalog of Variable Stars (June 2022 Version)” freely accessible on the Internet. That provides us with coordinates (RA, Dec) and basic information on those stars (i.e. Name, Variability Type, Spectral Type).

  Having the basic information of a particular variable star, we then query NASA’s Kepler and K2 data products to get the light curves of it, which those missions recorded. We clean the curves, compute the variability period if necessary, and generate audio and visual information which will be displayed in our app.

Hackathon Journey

The journey started with the presentation at Madrid’s venue space, where we started our discovery on this hackathon with curiosity and some apprehension too.

Then the first challenge to overcome was to build a team. This was a really tough part. Somehow we found us all in the same situation and had to open up quietly and become outspoken.

We assessed our matching based on complementary background and knowledge to build a multidisciplinary team with marketing, development, astrophysics, telecom engineering, economy, consultancy, and project management. We happily went home with a team and a challenge selected.

The challenge we picked was based on feelings and interests for all team members, even though we do not have all advanced levels on the subject.

We learnt to quickly adjust ourselves to become a team and dispatch activities based on knowledge and interests. Trust building had been crucial on this split of tasks. First half of the day we often reviewed the tasks to ensure we were all aligned and avoid task duplication.

Globally, it has been an intensive and immersive experience with all of the learnings and takeaways.

References

Graphical Resources, music for the presentation, tools:



Tags

#stellar variability, #barrier-free, #inclusion, ·#impaired users, #sound, #enjoyble, ·#education

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

The stars above are constantly changing, but usually these changes are too slow or too faint for the eye to see. Your challenge is to develop a learning tool to teach people about stellar variability and help them understand how dynamic the night sky really is!