Twinkle thinkers

Mexico City | Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

CONSTELLATION ASTRONAUT

High-Level Project Summary

We create an interactive application for educational purposes for middle and high school students, in order to show the movement and brightness variation of a constellation, in this demo Orion.Created for students interested in astronomy, our project aims to be an interactive tool for accessing constellation information such as its movements, changes in brightness, magnitudes, etc.It is important to create compelling sources of information to get young audiences interested in astronomy.

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10RnA5aLY1sENtVgTvyqslLsi9xAeMkKH?usp=sharing

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtu.be/DJmBV7yoKE4

Detailed Project Description

CONSTELLATION ASTRONAUT

The project is an interactive star viewer for educational purposes so that young people become interested in astronomy. It consists of a main page which shows the constellation of Orion with which you can interact with the nebula M42 and the super-giant star Rigel. Selecting any of the options will display a three-dimensional model of the selection.

The 3D ones were created with Blender, trying to resemble the behavior of both the nebula and the star. These models were recorded to be able to put them in a three-dimensional space of Unity and thus achieve a demo of what is intended to be achieved with the application.

Application Development

Unity

Unity is a cross-platform video game engine available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux and has a free version with an intuitive interface that allows the integration of three-dimensional models and animations for the creation of interactive applications.

Unity represented the ideal environment for the creation of the application, making use of its interfaces for the creation of the demo.

Blender

Blender is a multi-platform computer program, dedicated especially to modeling, lighting, rendering, animation and the creation of three-dimensional graphics in an artistic or programmable way.

Blender is of the most importance since programming is possible within the platform, which means that it is possible to achieve the most accurate modeling of the behavior of nebulae by considering the existing gravitational fields, as well as the influence of gravitational fields and magnetic fields in the movements of the cosmic elements.

Future projections

It is intended to model the 20 brightest stars of the constellation to obtain and show a three-dimensional model of the constellation as well as the modeling of the nebulae of the constellation (M42, M43, M78) taking into account their gravitational interactions, fields magnetic etc. to obtain a model closer to the movements presented in the nebulae.

The integration of the "heartbeat" of the stars based on their X-ray emissions is intended, it indicates the distance between the stars and the solar system. Said "heartbeat" would be presented in the form of the variation or tinkling of the light emitted by the star, In addition to a synchronized sound for a more striking audiovisual experience.

Space Agency Data

https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html

This one we use to get inspiration about the twinkle and how start bright.

https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/timing1.html

We getsome inspiration in how display a "heartbeat" of a star.

https://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/chandra101.html

We learn how to interpretate H-W diagrams and obtain parameters to create a "heartbeat".

https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/archive.html

We can consult differentes data bases for obtain relevan information about Orion and we cansimulate and aproximate its behavior.

https://theskylive.com/

We search color of the constellation and images for references, also some parameters.

Hackathon Journey

The experience in this hackaton was amazing, we know about this a few days ago and we decided to try it. It was the first time we try this type of challenges, also the freedom to implement the solutions was fantastic. It was one time at 3 am on Sunday we really thinked it was the end for us but we did a efford and finished the project with a functional aplication.

We learn a lot about the stars, they have a lot of parameters and it is incredible how much explore missions exist. In addition, the differents viewer and the way they display information was a challenge to obtain the information we needed.

We thak the opportunity and wait for the next challenge!