Spectral Explorer

Spectral Explorer| 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.

Summary

We made a visualization tool. Our tool converts spectrum values to grid values and gets draws energy-spectrum graphs using grid graphs. And it plots the wavelength - the number of photons per unit area graph per second.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our tool - Spectral Explorer- plots the wavelength - the number of photons per unit area graph per second using input values. Spectral explorer is a portable solution, It works on web browser. Thus, people can use it on different devices such as desktop, mobile, Internet of Things devices etc. and different operating systems.

How We Developed This Project

Our team members loves astrophysics. One of our team member, Yagmur, is astrophysics undergraduate student. She mentioned how observation tools are important for them. We decided to develop an easy to use solution. Astrophysicists use python libraries such as astropy, pyvo etc. Our goal is to ensure these people use these tools without any coding experience. So they can focus on their work. We use python programming language and django. Our time was limited to develop our solution, nevertheless we made a good looking and easy to use solution.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We use pyvo python library to search for and retrieve spectra from VO services using the Registry and the Simple Spectral Access (SSA) protocol. We can get spectral data provided by space agencies easily using pyvo.