Sunsets in Space

Astronauts can’t coordinate their sleep schedules with the sun. This makes it harder to transition to life on Earth! So we decided to create a "fake sun" so they would be able to follow light cycles!

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Inspiration

We wanted to create a solution for astronauts struggling to regulate their sleep cycles so they would have a better experience coming back down to Earth.

What it does

It is a clock that changes its background color with the sunrise, sunset, daytime, and nighttime. There are also buttons to change the background display for the demo.

How we built it

We built this project in VS Code with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We used Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot to assist us with writing JavaScript code, .gitignore, choosing fonts, and creating the buttons for the demo.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few issues with collaborating uniformly in the VS code files. We also struggled to connect the index.html to the custom domain at first due to DNS errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of building a successful project that achieves our intended goal. We were able to collaborate and work through problems with debugging and choosing the design of the website. Most importantly, by taking real-time data from the UTC time and choosing distinct colors, we made our sunset clock more accessible to astronauts in space.

What we learned

How to collaborate in a project simultaneously and work together towards our solution. We learned new languages such as JavaScript and CSS. We figured out how to build a website with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Specifically, we learned how to create a digital clock feature and debug inconsistencies between the domain and the HTML file.

What's next for Sunsets in Space

Adding a gradual change in background to match how the sky changes colors throughout the day. As well as adding a local time zone feature to allow users to access their local time zones and feel more connected to Earth.

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