Our Solar System

The home page, 10 years back
A page about Neptune

Inspiration

All of the members of our group love science and space, and wanted to learn about web development while also helping others. We decided to make an educational website about our solar system, where users can interact with and learn about the solar system and all of its planets.

What it does

Our website has a home page where users can see the current relative positions of all of the planets in their orbits around the sun. A slider allows users to go 100 years into the past or future and see how the planets aligned or will align in those times as well. Users can also click on planet icons to take a deep dive and learn much more about each of the planets on their own unique page.

How we built it

We used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to design the website and got some data from NASA. We didn't use any APIs, frameworks, or libraries.

Challenges we ran into

None of us truly knew JavaScript, and we all had limited experience with HTML and CSS, so we had to learn all of those along the way, which was a big challenge. Calculating the positions of the planets was also difficult because we had to get the current date, compare it to a seed date with preloaded angles, and use trigonometry to calculate positions around the elliptical orbits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have built a website with very little previous experience, at all of our first hackathons. We are proud that we were able to accurately calculate real time, past, and present positions of the planets that are interactive. We are also proud that we were able to smoothly build navigation between different web pages. Finally, we are proud that we have created something with the potential to truly be educational.

What we learned

We learned a ton about JS, HTML, and CSS syntax, formatting, styling, and more. We learned about how to calculate elliptical orbits and place planets along them. We learned a lot about merging git branches and avoiding conflict creation while multiple people worked on one project. We also learned a lot of great fun facts about our solar system!

What's next for Our Solar System

In the future, we would love to build it out a little more: more consistent formatting, more fun facts, a more interactive slider on the home page, a more descriptive about page, and maybe even information about moons and other non-planetary bodies in our solar system.