Time-a-Scope

We put a telescope in your pocket and make space exploration accessible. With Time-a-Scope, we can give you past, present and future predictions of where the stars will be and navigate you to them.

Comment

Inspiration

Our inspirations for this project was that we wanted to create an application that would aid space exploration while also being fun for the everyday user, and we accomplished the latter by designing the app so that the user can bring their mobile device up to just below their eye, and then spin their head around until the app indicates that they are directly looking at the physical location of the selected planet or star at the selected time.

What it does

By completing this project, our goal was to build an app that would act as a beneficial mechanism for space exploration by allowing users to visualize the physical direction of a selected planet or star, at a specific given time, either in the past, present, or future. The application allows a user to select a planet or star and then determines the absolute distance of the planet from the user's location on earth, along with the current direction of the planet/star at the given moment in time. The easy-to-use UI allows users to interact with the application like they would a telescope.

How we built it

We built this application by finding a Python package that would return the physical location of a planet or star given a date and time as input. From there, we were able to leverage the location, compass, and gyroscope features of the mobile device running React Native to detect the proper direction that points towards the physical location of the planet or star.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into included the speed of our application’s responsiveness towards quick movements and search queries. In order to fix this issue, we had to rework our application’s structure to minimize the frequency of calling certain callback functions when it was unnecessary to do so. Once we fixed this, we were able to increase the speed of the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some accomplishments that we were proud of included building our own Flask API and deploying it to a server so that it does not have to be run locally for a machine to be able to use our application. This also opens up the possibility for us to publish our application for public use. Another accomplishment we were proud of was our frontend design and how we were able to cultivate a sleek and minimalist compass design, but use it to help contribute to space exploration.

What we learned

We learned that it’s important to go into a group project with a plan. We wanted to make sure that we had delimited roles for each of our group members, and we felt that this made our hackathon experience much more seamless than it would’ve been otherwise. We also learned that it’s good to have backup plans and be flexible when features need to be modified in a given moment. In a project with such a short amount of time, it can be hard to predict what features can be feasibly and efficiently implemented. Because of this, it is important to have backup plans and be willing to adapt when it becomes clear that our project needs to be adjusted.

What's next for Time-a-Scope

For our project, our big goal is to publish this application on a public app store. Before doing this, of course, we would like to take the time to test our application’s features, try and add more features that maybe we did not think of before, as well as test the existing features to ensure that there are no issues with them. Once we know that our app is solid, we would like to publish it.

Built With

  • expo-location
  • expo-sensors
  • frontend:-react-native-backend:-python-with-a-flask-api-server-package:-skyfield-in-python
Share this project:

Updates