Astraloq

Community building for anyone passionate about astronomy!

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Inspiration

Beginner astronomers often find it difficult to get their foot in the door when it comes to astrophotography. We wanted to build a platform dedicated to helping astronomy enthusiasts find community.

What it does

Astraloq is an event calendar, photo sharing platform, and discussion forum for astral events and community get-togethers. Users have the ability to attend events and connect with fellow attendees. Additionally, users can share and view photos of the events they're attending as another means to engage with the astronomy community.

How we built it

To build Astraloq, we used React on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and NeonDB (serverless PostgreSQL) as our database. We used Chakra-UI for styled React components and SQLModel as an ORM to synchronize our Python data models with our database schema. On the development side, we used VSCode as our editor of choice and DBeaver as our database client. For some of our astronomy-related event data and photos, we pulled resources from an AstronomyAPI.

Challenges we ran into

For this hackathon, we decided to learn some new technologies. Chakra-UI and FastAPI were completely new to us, so there was a bit of a learning curve for the first few hours of the hackathon. However, once the ball started rolling, we were able to build features quickly.

Our team was split into two frontend devs and one full-stack dev. We were all working on the same repository, so we had to take steps to make sure we were stepping on each others' toes. To solve this, we used git branches and feature-based task delegation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All in all, we're super proud of all that we were able to accomplish in just 24 hours with relatively new tech stack. We're also proud of how much we learned in a single weekend.

Some key features we're particularly proud of include:

  • Event-based live chat and photo sharing
  • User profiles
  • Global and local events calendar

What we learned

As mentioned above, we learned a lot of new tech during this hackathon. However, our biggest area of growth was learning how to work teammates we've never worked with before. We dedicated time to getting to know each other and setting up effective teamwork strategies to help us deliver our project on time.

What's next for Astraloq

We're very proud of what we've accomplished within the 24 hour time limit, so here are some features that we'd love to add in the future.

  1. Cloud Cover Display
    • When users view an event, there will be an icon and text explaining the weather forecast of the event's time and place.
  2. Light Pollution Display
    • When users view an event, there will be a link that will bring them to a view of the light pollution Bortle level at and around the location of the event.

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