Astronomy Forecast

Universe is fantastic

Inspiration

We have a passion for observing stars, but the challenge lies in consistently identifying and observing our favorite stars each night. To address this, we have developed a systematic prediction system that enables us to anticipate and locate the specific stars we wish to observe.

What it does

Our star observation forecast system allows users to predict the stars visible from a specified city, currently limited to Amherst. Every day, the system generates a list of stars observable in that location. Users can conveniently click on individual stars within the list to access information and images associated with each star. This approach enhances the stargazing experience by providing a user-friendly interface for exploring and learning more about the stars.

How we built it

We first built the front-end with HTML, CSS, and JS. Then we scraped API from free sources such as Astronomy API to get the longitude, latitude, elevation, from_date, to_date, and time parameters. We want those parameters hidden to let the user take it easy by just typing the city and then the constellations of today and the next 10 days will generated from API. We also use Weather API to get the location parameters like longitude, latitude, and elevation. We use Insomnia.rest tool to support us in scrapping API with the Restful API method. We also try to create a private function to take from_date, to_date, and time to show the result on the screen for the user. Mostly our work is about fetching API, asynchronous programming, and JS HTML DOM Manipulation.

Challenges we ran into

We have run into many challenges from the web interface to the logic behind it. We still haven't finished scraping API and doing asynchronous programming due to insufficient experience, so we just developed a static website with unfinished JavaScript code behind it. We were also still inexperienced with HTML and CSS, which cost us a lot of time to design a div and many things. We also can't handle with DOM Manipulation to do the action behind the interface. Therefore we can't develop many ideas we came up with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a lot of ideas and all of them possible (if we have sufficient background in web development). Though our project still hasn't finished yet, our team will try to develop and finish it further to let us practice and gain more experience.

What we learned

HTML, CSS, JS, DOM manipulation, Scraping API, Asynchronous Programming

What's next for Astronomy Forecast

We will develop a universe where people can write on them, that feature will let us develop the backend and client-side server since we will manage user and databases.