High-Level Project Summary
To get a better understanding of how the stars in our night skies change their brightness, we developed a solution to engage those seeking this explanation. For this, we build an interactive website, with the basic explanation of how variable stars exist and most of their types. This solution solves our challenge by bringing visual elements to help explain while including buttons to help users navigate through the different types of variable stars. It is important as just saying that stars change their brightness is not the best way of teaching, because of this we thought of bringing a new and animated way to make users learn more about the different type of stars and why they change.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
About our project:
We developed a website that serves as an interactive tool to make its users learn more about variable stars and its types. We brought an impactful way to visualize how they correlate with their brightness.
How does it work:
After accessing our website, the user is sent to the main page where they can visualize the variable stars types separated by their category. By hovering your mouse in each type, a text box is presented with a text to indulge the user to click and by clicking the user is sent to a detailed explanation with amusing 3D visuals where you can zoom and rotate the screen to get a better view and on the side of the page, it is presented a text box with an even bigger explanation of its type.
Below the 3D visuals, the user can find buttons to navigate among types and easily understand about the different types with stunning visuals. For a more detailed explanation of stars in general, the user can find a link on the bottom of the screen.
Our intention:
Our main objective was to develop an unique and interactive way to show users that lack the previous knowledge about this topic, some form of content to be easily viewed and read. We hoped to achieved a way to show more about our stars and how they affect the night sky brightness.
Resources used:
To develop our website, we used Javascript as our primary programming language and to help us achieve our 3D visuals, we used an 3D library called Three.js, as it immensely helped us to easily setup our 3D environment. For hosting services, we hosted with Github Pages.
Next steps:
As the main objective of this event is to bring more knowledge to our scientific community, we hope to bring more information about the subcategories of the variable star types, more examples and refine the appearances from our visuals.
Space Agency Data
We mainly used as a resource the General Catalog of Variable Stars from the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center from NASA, available here.
It was our primary source of information related to variable stars because this information is the core to explaining why the stars in our night sky changes its brightness.
Hackathon Journey
It was an incredible experience, first, we made a meeting to think about what we want to face as a challenge and we defined that we would like to learn more about the space while using a more interactive and unique way to solve a challenge. That is why we landed in Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, because it challenged us to learn more about the variability in stars while trying to present this in an interactive way to the users. We learnt a lot of our stars and how they differ from each other, as a team we learnt how to trust each other to tackle the challenge individually while bringing everything together in one big project.
We began this project with the idea that we wanted something palpable for our users, something to interactive with while learning about a topic that was always presented as too theorical. By bringing an interactive tool for the users, we had to be sure that we acquired sufficient knowledge to be an effective medium to pass the knowledge, since our resources are all from the most respectable Space Agencies from around the world, it was always very resourceful and helpful.
Although it was not a rapid start, we chose to step back in the beginning and pass three hours since the start of the hackathon to gather knowledge about variable stars, since it was a known hurdle that we had to overcome as soon as possible to start building our interactive tool, nevertheless, we managed to surpass the setbacks and achieve our goal of delivering an interactive tool which the users can learn more about how our stars change. Primarily, we would like to thank the NASA for this incredible Hackathon, very well thought and organized. Secondly, thanks to all local leads, especially those from our location which made this event even more comfortable to do. Last, but not least, to all space agencies around the world that make our civilization pushes forward its knowledge and science by uncovering the mysteries from space.
References
Tags
#star, #brightness, #nightsky, #website, #interactive, #website, #variablestar, #js, #3dmodeling, #learning, #science, #quaternary , #team