Look Above

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A preview of the website.

Inspiration

The stars are a wonderful thing, but due to light pollution, we are able to see less and less of them. This project was created in order to reinspire that feeling of wonder.

What it does

This project allows you to view the star patterns at any time of the year at the Memorial Union. Users are able to see positions of stars in the night sky as the visualization progresses. This visualization is meant to inspire viewers to research about light pollution, and instill wonder!

How we built it

We used three.js, star data from https://heavens-above.com, and image data from Google Maps in order to create our project.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some trouble while trying to dump the panorama we found from Google Maps. Google Maps actually does not download the full panorama while displaying it interactively: it downloads individual tiles, and stitches them all together. To combat this, we had to recreate this process ourselves. So we wrote a bash script to download each tile, and used a command-line image editor to stitch all of them together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to learn how to use three.js effectively in such a short timespan. The UV mapping we had to do onto the hemisphere to display the stars was very tricky to get down.

What we learned

We learned about the positions of stars in the sky, how to effectively use three.js to render objects, how to use the date-time library from Javascript, and how to grab data from webpages!