H1 LAST DEVLOG !!!!!

Finally it’s here , LookUp V2 , the coding project that makes me the most proud of this journey !

So I’m making this quick because it is actually almost 3:00AM where I live…….

From last time the most notable features that where added :

-Being able to email me from settings suggestions

-Making my own way to get the infos regarding light pollution and rating it

-Giving a score for tonight observability (nothing too serious I rushed that understanding that making something precise is way too hard for my situation.)

-Ugly display of that score (made today around 00:00 )

-Getting displayed what you can see with eyes / bino / telescope (regarding that , I need to add more celestials objects into the catalogue because they seems to all be visible even by eyes in the proper conditions.)

That’s pretty much it very summarized , thanks for reading this last devlog , now come submitting (;

H1 NEXT THING IS SHIPPING !!!

Ok so many features and improvements have been made but I will keep it “secret” for now. I’m currently on my deadline to ship this project. So when it will be shipped I’ll elaborate on what’s new and a overall review of LookUP v2 !!!

Right now I’m working on the lightpollution rating , that’s the last “complex” thing that I have to make , after that the rest SEEMS pretty simple but we’ll see (;

Tommorow is my deadline , please dev/admin have some pity for me …

Cya (:

Hey (;

Been a little while !

So from last time I worked in things that are pretty much behind the scene for now.

As an example of what I am saying , I worked on some api call , and refining my backend.

But basicaly , without trying to list everything the main new things are :

-A guiding arrow for the user to be able to spot / target the wanted celestial object much quicker.

-Settings menu that can be accesed from the home page , for now the only available action is to change the “main color” of the web app , but I find it pretty cool and also liked coding it (I did it without any google or anything , just the IDE and my brain hehe)

-Got back to work with APIs , goals : refine rating of the weather related to the position of the user , add changes to the overall rating with moon phase , atmosphere turbulances ( if I can do that , idk) and lastly light pollution ( this one will be special to do , there is no direct API that suits my criterias , so I’ll do something myself).

For some the progress from last time while seem pathetic because there is nothing really fancy FOR NOW , this coming week is the rush for me don’t worry I’ll try my best to get it done !

Good luck to everybody for the final days of stardance (=

HERE AGAIN !!!!!

Okay so few days passed , school started for me but STILL working on my LookUp website (I want to get a gift with stardust for my girlfriend but I don’t think it’s possible to work this many hours now…….).

Many littles features and improvements have been made as you can see in the video compared to the last one. (Please don’t focus on the top degrees display it’s BROKEN /:)

Mainly I focused on adding all the celestial objects from the catalogue into the 3d space !

Everything seems to work fine now for the looking up part (;

MANY things are still to be done but I’m going to get there because I want to post a video about this project in about 20 days hehe (believe will maybe make it possible..)

I don’t want to get to much into listing what I have done neither what is still left but to summerize :

-Overall esthetic of the webapp
-Features for better 3d space
-Weather/Observabilty part related to astronomical observation
-Some settings features (;

Please leave a like or a comment to support me , last post was …. yeah lol

Love y’all , keep up the good work !

BACK BABY !!!

Okay so I’m going to try to summerize what I’ve done in a few days
(didn’t know that when +10hr logged the rest aren’t taken for the payout calculation…. MY BAD)

So in the last devlog I was at the step of acquiring the SIMBAD database positions of the celestials objects that I wanted. So I was able to figure that out and let yall with the results of having things like
=> Sirius , RA/DEC of 101 / -16.

During this period this is pretty much all I did in “order” :

-First I converted the RA / DEC into Az/Alt coords , that allows to
locate the object for the user by him being the anchor point of this ,
so for example a Az of 90° is at East and a Alt of 70° in addition with
the Az means the object is at East pretty high up in the sky because
it’s 70° from the horizon.This step took some time because I really
tried to understand the logic behind it , at some point I understood all
the steps / elements needed for the mathematical trick that was needed , from there I cherched forums for astronomical formulas and magic from there hehe. (Screenshot of the js script for that)

-From there after some esthetical adjustements I went into brefly
learning Three.Js , an beautiful webdev tool that makes us devs able to
Create / Display / Render some 3D for our websites !!!!
I for now learned pretty much the basic and didn’t really put much
effort into the esthetic (FOR NOW) , as you can see in the screenshot
( = .

-2 days ago I started working on the backend (with Render thx) that was needed for my app to hide the APIs Key. This step wasn’t something I really enjoyed because even tho I understood all the logical thing behing every requirement and action , I still remained stuck for long moments without any idea. This lead to Claude helping me , sorry );
BUT it was only minor bugs that would’ve took me SO MANY TIME to see , like wow… Now my only issue is that I am currently using a free plan for my server so after a little time without request , it will go to sleep and when the first request after that comes , it will take a pretty long time to load (Around 40s/1min … making the first Loading for some user TOO LONG)

-AND NOW here we are ! So in the last hours logged what I did is add the scope for the 3d page and also position a pink sphere representing the selected object at his ACTUAL POSITION (like in Stellarium hehe). Today I also got in Raycasting method to click on a mesh and trigger an event. Yes in 3d like three.js adding a simple EventListener(“click”…) can’t be done. So the Idea is casting a ray from a point like your mouse and this ray (A mathematical Vector) will INTERSECT with the mesh if
correctly orientated and THIS will prove to us that the usre clicked on
the object. That is for me useful for a feature : I want that when the
user succesfuly place the object in his LookUp scope , my JS detect this
with a ray casted from the center of the scope and is then able to show
a little info pannel like you can see in the 2nd screenshot again !

So yeah that’s it ! I find letting multiple logged days more enjoyable
to devlog so Imma keep it like that I think (;

Next step is really being able to control the 3D camera with the
deviceorientationabsolute of the user’s phone.
(For now I have been able with Quaternion (set with Euler for now) , to
make a cube rotate with the phone being physically rotated IRL)

If someone READ all that , please tell me in the comments what do you
think , that would MAKE MY DAY , for real !

Love to yall <3

DAY 8 ! Made some progress hehe (;

Okay so YESTERDAY , my goal was pretty clear , I wanted to get to a point where my python program for writing a .txt with all the datas for the celestial objects will be good. So I changed somethings because I feel like I was running towards a wall that I could simply dodge. So the big change was that instead of using a sort of celestial_objects_list.txt , I instead took the names of the objects that I wanted directly from my datas.js in order to after fill them.

In the Afternoon , with this first part accomplished , I went into trying to understand how I could convert my Ra and Dec astronomical positions into Az / Alt ones with the help of the location of the User and their precise time according to their location.

So right now I know that I could simply copy a script like that with all that I needed but I will try before correcting it with others examples online to seek understanding myself and writing it like I UNDERSTAND.

Right now I know that I need to calculate the GMST (Greenwich Mean Sidereal Time) , this time with what I understood is something that will help me deal with the rotation of earth on itself by correcting it to have something “fixed”?

THX FOR READING , <333

Hm hm , Day 7..

Yeah so today I don’t got much to tell , I spent all the coding time trying to figure out myself solutions for somes issues that I have. I pretty much went by the previous devlog plan today for having referenced names of data.js. But couldn’t figure all out today , will try to finish everything with the python script tommorow so I can get to more exciting stuff…

Sorry for today being kinda “bad”.

Love !!!!

Day …… 6 , hehe.

Okay so today worked a really tiny time on this bcs last day of vacantions for me ); (all good tho).

So I spend the time refining the python script for the .txt , I wanted to gather some others name from the SIMBAD database for each objects. After sometime I endded up with this code BUT as you can see adding all the others names of the objects is implying hundreds of new lines. The issue ? : to put each objects data in my data.js I will need an name that I want to find in all this other names but if there are SO MUCH to check , I’ll feel bad for this lack of performance.

SO , I will try to do something like :
-data.js will have all the objects with names already instaured (for ex : Andromeda)
-I’ll put that into a .txt
-then in my python script I will try to select for the name(s).? , the corresponding one.

As you can see my mind is still pretty sketchy about this so time will tell us…

I’ll seriously get into putting more hours to this from tomorrow , love yall !!!!!

DAY 5 , yeahhhh!

Okay so today I did what I wanted to do.
I’ve succeded at making the request with SIMBAD TAP for the position of objects in space (Ra & Deg) and then tranfering this in a JSON form inside of a .txt , from there I picked it up with JS and console.log the datas !

Maybe it seems pretty chill but it wasn’t intuitive for the request part because of a bug explained in the last devlog.

Now the next step is with all thoses infos on objects , being able to calculate the Alt & Az from the user POV to make them able for a display in my website!

Also I will soon need to dig a little about backend because I can’t publish this on Github bcs of some API keys… So yeah one day !

THANK YOU FOR READING !!!!!

Day 4 !!… of torturing myself with coding.

Okay so I’m posting this devlog a little late because the day passed but still.

Yesterday I started trying to implement Astroquery SIMBAD into my code , the goal ? Having a database from where I could take astronomical position value of all the celestial objects I need (this come in Ra & Deg) and from there I will convert it to where it is situated ocmpared to user location.

Also read the comment on the code screenshot because I’m explaining why I used ChatGPT because of a “software issue?” , my code was fine but juste wouldn’t work so he helped me.

So I put down some console result for you to see !! Now for this feature there is still the converting part but the rest will NORMALLY be more intuitive.

Love yall (;

D-d-d-d-ay 3 of devlogs !!

Okay so today I worked pretty well on some finitions and also on the “show all “and “visible” buttons. You can see pretty much how all this work together in the little video. Also I want to mention that for pretty much all this UI , Chatgpt helped with around 10% of the work , I really tried to use it only if necessary or to learn deeper about a concept/technique.

After that I started like said yesterday to see how astroquery SIMBAD could help me with my project. Now I’m pretty sure that I got the theorical part like you can see in the notes screen.

Anyways my day is far from being finished so I think tonight I will again try to work 1/2hours on getting the positions of celestial objects.

Keep up the good work yall !!!!

DAY 2 , hehe!

Okay so today I started working really late because I went moutain
hiking (in vacations for a few days then real work (; ).

I tried to inform myself and understand how apps like Stellarium works
about gathering the postions of the celestial objects for like +1hr. So
for now I think I will work with a database that is SIMBAD , I will
gather some infos with sql or python (Astroquery | TAP SIMBAD). Then
from here I THINK I’ll calculate the azimuth & altitude with the
user being the perspectif point.

After I juste styled little things because I was exhausted after a
lonngggngng day
-fews CSS changes (like user-select : none)
-added the Observability text for the section
-Finally started working on buttons that will make possible for the user
to show all objects or only visibles ones for him (with altitude ,
observability conditions and his equipment).

DAY 1 … for my cosmical observation asistant !

I lied. I in fact started really working on this project a little time ago like you can read in his description (;

Why only posting now ? Cause I didn’t had a clue stardance existed (btw if any admin is reading this , the concept is AMAZING !!).

Ok now real talk. Today I didn’t code that much due to not being home for a little time. But I still managed to do some brainstorming about the features that are linked towards telling / showing to the user the rating I give to tonight sky for astronomical observation and to the specific celestial object he wants to Look Up to (;

So I codded a … thing… (full of if if if , but dw it’s for a moment i’ll change it after implementing first what I need , plz don ’t hate YET).

After that I quickly added a little dot of red/yellow/green color to tell the user if the object selected is observable with CURRENT CONDITIONS (based on the V1 of this app and worth with altitude and magnitude of the planet selected) , btw the moon rn isn’t visible where I am (I think??) , so working for NOW.

That’s all for my really long devlog today , love to yall <3