#12 - Night Sky

Inspiration

3 people on our team live in cities and barely ever get to see the stars because of light pollution. We realized that we don't know much about the stars, constellations, or any of the stuff. We thought creating something to help kids see stars would help the community by educating kids about a fun and interesting topic as well as inspiring a passion for science

What it does

Our project takes in a ZIP code and then shows the area of that zip code on a map and outputs an image that shows the night sky with many constellations, planets, and stars labeled.

How we built it

We build it using python and the google colab framework in python. We used many apis and packages that we had never seen before.

Challenges we ran into

none of us have ever really coded in python before or created any front-end work. The lack of front-end experience proved to be our biggest challenge. Also, we had to learn how to use APIs as this was the first hackathon for 3 of our members and we didn't have much practical coding experience

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm really proud that we got something up and running. We didn't really know what to expect since all of us are very inexperienced with hackathons. All of us had experience with languages like C++ and Java so we had to learn python from scratch and we are really proud to have come up with something that works in this small amount of time while learning so much.

What we learned

We learned python, we learned about api calls, we learned about connecting files, we learned about how to create thing that aren't just text based, one of our members learned how try and exception works, we learned a ton at Hoya

What's next for Night Sky

This project could be taken to the next level with a front end framework like react or tkinter. Also we thought that there could be some AR implementation akin to what we saw in the Collins Aerospace workshop by moving around the phone and seeing different things in the sky or have the sky seem like it pops out so you can analyze specific areas.