High-Level Project Summary
Our project is a web application simulation, whose purpose is to visualise the dynamic night sky. Usually people can't see these changes with the naked eye. For that reason we have made it interactable so that the user can understand the stars' dynamics better.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
We have created a simulation in a website, which displays the dynamics of the stars in a custom space environment. It allow the user to interact with the night sky, a.k.a. to change certain parameters of the stars such as color, size and twinkle rate. This only applies to a few stars which we focus on. There are also stars in the background, which add to the atmosphere. Their only parameter is twinkle rate. Every star is generated at a random position every time, creating a unique environment every time. We hope that we can show the users how dynamic the night sky actually is. For this certain purpose we didn't use a no-coding app. Instead of this, we decided to code it ourselves, because we didn't want to be obligated with the limits of an app. We used HTML5 for the base of the site, CSS for the styling and visuals and JavaScript for the sole essence of the simulation.
Space Agency Data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib64cwOJxpo&ab_channel=NASASpaceAppsChallenge
https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html
We used the given video and some examples and resources from NASA as explanation to what we should be doing in our simulation. Reference images and clips helped us imagine and create it. They inspired us to create a dynamically changing and interactive environment for the users.
Hackathon Journey
During the hackathon we learned how dynamic the cosmos is and what events could change it - for example the twinkling of the stars, cephieds and so on. We chose this challenge because we liked the idea of showing people how dynamic the stars really are. We created a simulation because it's an easy way to show people how stars can change and to let them interact with the created environment. It was a challenge to develop a simulation, because we have never tried to make something like this before. But with a lot of research and hard work, we managed to realize our primary idea.
References
https://www.w3schools.com/html/ - We used W3schools' explanations and examples to understand and upgrade our code.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib64cwOJxpo&ab_channel=NASASpaceAppsChallenge
https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html
Tags
#space #simulation #stars #night #webapplication #stellar