39 строки
1.8 KiB
Markdown
39 строки
1.8 KiB
Markdown
# Sky Banana Party
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**See the app at <http://skybanana.party/>!** (Note: it will not work over
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HTTPS — only plain HTTP for now ☹)
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A website that shows recent [LIGO](https://www.ligo.org/) events on the sky.
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It's got a silly name, but the hope is that it will show how to create a
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simple web app that uses
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[WorldWide Telescope](http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/) technology to power
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a nice, interactive all-sky visualization of astronomical data.
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This project was started during the [AAS233](https://aas.org/meetings/aas233)
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Hack Together Day, but only the barest progress was made that day. Getting
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nice localization sky maps out of LIGO data turned out to be harder than
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anticipated!
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## Technical Overview
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The frontend of the website as seen by users is simple static content that’s
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stored in `frontend/`. It’s very quick to create a WWT control, and then
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there’s some custom JavaScript to download the LIGO event data and render them
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in the WWT framework. The frontend is served off of Google Cloud Storage.
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The frontend makes API calls against a backend that provides programmatic
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access to a small database. The backend runs in
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[Google App Engine](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/), simply because it’s
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a system with which the author was familiar. The main implementation is in
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`backend/main.py`. It’s relatively simple, and just provides a small API for
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retrieving data about LIGO events and their localizations.
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The idea is that when LIGO is running, the app will show events as they occur.
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But in the meantime, we have to show something. The directory `bootstrap/` has
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code to bootstrap the event database with data from the LIGO
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[O1/O2 Catalog](https://www.ligo.org/detections/O1O2catalog.php).
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## Legalities
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Copyright 2019 Peter K. G. Williams. Licensed under the MIT license.
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