This project is done as a part of Krittika Summer Project, IIT Bombay. It includes contributions by me and other teammates involved in making the project.
Messier objects which include clusters, galaxies, nebulae and other fun stuff are perhaps the most attractive part of night sky observations. Since these objects cannot usually be seen with the naked eyes we employ the use of stars nearby to arrive at these objects called 'hops' Due to the limited resolution of sky mapss, not all stars involved in the hop are shown and this can make things quite frustrating. This project is aimed at hunting messiers for fun by developing and automating the procedure to find hopping guidelines for various stellar objects like Messiers by creating an interface that takes into account different input parameters.
- Used various existing catalogs for creating the database.
- Used python scripts that use the database information to generate output plots and guidelines.
- Created an easy to understand hopping guide that accommodates different markers for different objects and IAU legends.
- Created two separate interfaces one for the users and one for the editors.
- Created the user interface such that takes the name of the stellar objects, location of the user, date and time as inputs and generates the hopping guide to that particular stellar object as output.
This interface is designed for the purpose of making hops and is integrated with a hopping algorithm that is used for finding the hops and ease editor's process.
This interface is used for accepting the inputs from the user and plot the hops on the sky plot using the existing hopping database created using the Editor Interface.
The final project is containated in folder Final Project and captures contributions of all the team members. The rest of the folders contain my contribution in the project, including weekly assignments and mini-projects given as a part of learning and contribution in the main project as well.
Happy Hopping!