Galaxy Seekers| 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.

Galaxy Seeker

Summary

Galaxy Seeker is a web interactive visualization tool that allows users to visualize the sky in different wavebands of light, from high energy gamma rays to radio waves, with images provided by various telescopes in NASA's HEASARCH's database. Also, it allows users to see the location in the sky where these telescopes were pointing at on a given date, if the record is available in the database.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We provide a visualization tool to improve accessibility to HEASARC data and how it is shown to different kinds of people, like scientist, physicist, astronomers and other people who are interest in the topic, so they can work and explore this data in a better and easier way.

How We Developed This Project

Our team wanted to analize the data and develop a better interface to study it.

First, we learn about different APIs in python to do the queries, but the API does not have some important parameters that we needed in our aladin.

Second, we used NAVO's SIA protocol to gather images in diferent wavelenght of light from Heasarc's Data Records.

Then, we tried to display the locations in the sky where the Heasarc's telescopes are pointed at in a given date.

Finally we designed an intuitive interface for experts and beginners to access this information as quick as possible.


Our web site can be visited here https://galaxyseeker.azurewebsites.net/.


Problems we encountered:

*Unintuitive database query protocols.

*It seems that some NAVO services do not implement the SIA protocol as per http://www.ivoa.net/documents/SIA/20140707/PR-SIA-2.0-20140707.html.



How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used the PyVO Python module to obtain URLs to .fits images from NASA'S HEASARC, these URLs are then saved in a text file and are then properly refered using the Aladin Javascript API based on the user query that is given through the web interface. We also wanted to use HEARSAC'S telescope catalogues to display current and previous observation but it was not possible.

Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
  1. NASA Astronomical Virtual Observatories.
  2. NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center.
  3. SkyView Virtual Observatory to get FITS images.
  4. Aladin Sky Atlas Lite.
  5. https://bootstrapmade.com/ for UI design.
Tags
#visualization #telescopes #wavelenghts #heasarc #ecci #onlinepizza #booksonline #mvp
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.