Inspiration
We were naturally drawn the Beyond the Globe Vertical stack since we all enjoy stars and space. Mainly the cool pictures NASA puts out. So we decided it would be cool if we made something that would allow us to view these pictures of the sky based on different locations. We also realized that showing pictures of the night sky would also be a great way of educating people about light pollution and how it could ruin pictures and the observation of stars.
What it does
The website allows users to enter in their longitude and latitude to see a picture of "the sky". On this new page there is a button at the bottom to go back to the main page, a button to go the resources page. On the resources page there are various links to helpful and informative websites. Lastly, there is an About Us tab to give ourselves a place to showoff (as well as experiment with elements).
How we built it
Most of the website is built on HTML. We tried to focus on dividing the pages into sections that would look alright and allow us to comfortably present the information. Originally, we had all style code in html files. However, through further learning, we realized it would be more convenient in the future if we just move the styling to a separate tab. We started with the resources page and then the About Us page and lastly the main page and sky page. The later pages required more unique elements which required us to learn more about HTML before implementing the code.
Challenges we ran into
As beginner developers, the main issue we ran into was picking a project that was possible to get mostly working by the end of the 36 hour work period. Learning HTML and CSS was very challenging and meant our project started very slowly. Additionally, we ran into issues with storing and retrieving the number values entered into the Longitude and Latitude boxes since it would likely require learning to add a framework to our project or to write a JavaScript script.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We would say a working website is already a big achievement for all of us. We were only ever exposed to C++ and a bit of Python, so to learn HTML and CSS in such a short time and create a website with 4 distinct pages was a huge accomplishment!
What we learned
We learned everything from the syntax of HTML and CSS to the form elements to creating separate CSS style sheets. I would also say we learned a good bit on how version control works when many people work on the same project files.
What's next for Starry Night
Obviously, the next step would be figuring out how to record the values the user inputs into the Longitude and Latitude boxes to input them and generate an image of the night sky. The image would likely come from another website/API. Additionally, we wanted to have information about light pollution near the coordinates used to inform people if they are in a heavily polluted area.
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