Skywalkers | Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Hey! What Are You Looking At?
EasySpaceDataAccess-ESDA
Summary
Team Skywalkers has a motto of “Amicable Problem Solving in Outer Space” and that is what we have set out to do. We have worked on making a tool that can access the archives of space agencies’ data effectively and quickly and present it in an appealing way that is accessible to everyone whether they are familiar with the field of astronomy or not. Our aim was to find a discernible middle ground for both casual visitors and professionals who needed a quick reference to the data provided by these agencies.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Team Skywalkers has a motto of “Amicable Problem Solving in Outer Space” and that is what we have set out to do. We have worked on making a tool that can access the archives of space agencies’ data effectively and quickly and present it in an appealing way that is accessible to everyone whether they are familiar with the field of astronomy or not. Our aim was to find a discernible middle ground for both casual visitors and professionals who needed a quick reference to the data provided by these agencies.
How We Developed This Project
Members - Aakash Gupta, Rishy Parasar and I, Ved Prakash Dubey, decided to manage the data handling, and visualisation aspect of the project.
I worked on the Simple Image Access Protocol to get a hold of the jpeg and FITS images of the desired celestial bodies.
Rishy worked on the Simple Spectal Protocol to get plots and graphs of the data received from x-ray and uv observatories and satellites, for ex. The Chandra Observatory and International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite.
Aakash worked on obtaining UV and X-ray images of the desired celestial bodies from the Chandra Observatory, Spitzer and Galex satellites.
Each query of a satellite will return a list of 10 celestial bodies whose data will be represented on the webpage. We are also working on providing a search bar that will help users to simply search for a celestial body/satellite by typing in it.
By clicking on a celestial body it will give a central focus of either the jpg image, spectral plot, or spectral image on the basis of what the user wants. It will also have a representation of other data that the user might find useful.
Members - Aniket Agarwal, Tanvi Gupta, and Saurav Kumar will be working on front-end and UI/UX development for the webpage. They will be doing their best to make it as accessible as possible without sacrificing credible data.
Members- Aakash Gupta and Rishy Parasar will be working on the back-end to ensure smooth operation.
On talking to the HEASARC lead expert, I discovered that a good implementation would be of a bookmark feature. The bookmark feature can allow users to pick the celestial body datasets that they like and save them to be accessible later. Like a shopping cart!
Our main issue was retrieving the data, since the protocols and the APIs were not all familiar. Even once we had figured out how to retrieve it we spent some time thinking what we could really do with it. Then we worked on making it more accessible and intuitive so that anyone from a casual astronomy enthusiast to an astronomer could use our webpage to get the data they want.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used data from the NAVO directory.
From the HEASARC - Xamin Catalog
Tools will be added that can be beneficial to the user. Tools will be using the existing dataset.
For example a search bar will be present where the user can simply type in the name and get a table of data with important columns such as, columns containing the coordinates, the redshift, the flux, the surface temperature, etc.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18BMwmUKZz4bxKxXW9llPFENKHSwZawbK/view?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
http://vao.stsci.edu/keyword-search/
https://nasa-navo.github.io/navo-workshop/CS_Catalog_Queries.html
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/