Big Sky - Space Apps Challenge

Big Sky| Hey! What Are You Looking At?

Hey! What Are You Looking At?

The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) archives space agencies' data from missions studying electromagnetic radiation from extremely energetic cosmic phenomena (e.g., gravitational wave detections, gamma ray bursts, and supernovae). The Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC) is another repository containing missions studying comets, asteroids, and exoplanets among other things. Your challenge is to create a visualization tool that can help people interested in these phenomena to access the data quickly and easily.

HEASARC and NEOSSat Data Viewer

Summary

This is a web-based application that would allow anybody interested in astronomy to easily view astronomical observations, and encourage them to learn more about astronomy. A user can interact with the "sky sphere" at the top of the page, and click on observations they'd like to learn more about. A card below the map displays some information about the observation and provides a download link for the FITS image file. The map is a list of all retrieved objects, and buttons to download their FITS image.The last feature is HEASARC Search, a search engine that can provide the user with images and download links of raw FIT files of matching objects retrieved from NASA's HEASARC database.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a web application to address this challenge. It's important because it collects very complex "space" data and displays it to the user in a more readable, and understandable format. It retrieves data about astronomical observations, and presents them to the user in several ways - on a "sky sphere," in a list, and in the form of a search engine which displays an image of the requested object.

How We Developed This Project

We were inspired to choose this challenge because we're interested in astronomy, and web application development. We developed the project by working together via voice chat, and using GitHub. We used Python, Flask and HTML/CSS to create the majority of the application. We had a couple of problems with optimizing data collection and display, primarily from a lack of deep knowledge about the subject, also some last minute troubles with hosting. However, we also had some great achievements - we successfully created a skymap with plotted, selectable objects, and we also created a functioning HEASARC search feature (although it is a bit slow, due to problems unrelated to our application).

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We directly used HEASARC data from NASA, and NEOSSat data from the CSA, because the purpose of this project was a map-based search engine, which helps people navigate through the databases.