Planet Finder

Inspiration

I wanted to experiment with an interesting API, and astronomy is definitely something that interests me

What it does

JPL has an API called Horizons which returns a wide variety of data based on a number of prompts. For example, given the location of an observer and the name of a target, JPL can tell you the apparent magnitude of the object taking into consideration weather conditions. My plan for the project was to feed the Planet Finder an observatory and a target planet and retrieve the Azimuth and Elevation of the target.

How we built it

My plan is to eventually deploy Planet Finder onto a website, and what I've built so far is entirely in Flask.

Challenges we ran into

The only experience I've had with web development is playing around with html in high school, so trying to get a handle on frameworks and how to get data from APIs was very tedious.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I had a pretty smooth time connecting my program to the GitHub repository, which was something that intimidated me before I came to Shellhacks

What we learned

This project has definitely revealed how much there is to learn regarding web development and programming in general. I'm used to writing programs in IDEs like Vivado and MPLAB, trying to learn Python to develop a website is an entirely different challenge.

What's next for Planet Finder

My next step is to deploy Planet Finder as a web application.

Built With

• flask
• horizon