Darkest Sky

This Project represents the convergence of my passion for astronomy with the craft of programming. It servers as a dynamic project where i apply scientific knowledge from astronomy and geography through programming techniques.

My goal is to make Darkest sky a platform where astronomy amateurs can meet at a certain stargazing spot, and organize events.

How does it suggest the best spot ?

This software utilizes a score system that take into consideration, light pollution, clouds, moon phase/brightness... With each variable having its own weight. The Coordinate generator, as it names suggest, generate coordinates for a given radius, under a grid. It calculates the score for each coordinate and then it output the best spot.

Coordinate generator utilises geospatial computation to generates the coords in a circular area.

Score

It is calculated in a straightforward manner, with a linear model. Here are the weights:

WEIGHTS = {
        "light_pollution": 0.3,
        "clouds": 0.2,
        "moon": 0.15,
        "elevation": 0.1,
        "air_quality": 0.1,
        "wind": 0.05,
        "distance": 0.1
    }

This score mechanism is ofc subject to change, as there are non-linear effects, and threshhold effects. To change a study must be conducted for precision.

Light Pollution

The light pollution data are from the Word Atlas 2015 dataset provided by the lightpollution api, which provides measurements to estimate light pollution levels.

Moon data

Moon data are locally calculated in Moon handler from the de430.bsp and naif0012.tls files.

• de430.bsp: This file is part of NASA's DE430 ephemeris, which provides high-precision positional data for celestial bodies, including the Moon. It allows for accurate computation of the Moon's position in relation to Earth at any given time, which is essential for understanding its impact on observations and measurements.

• naif0012.tls: This file includes definitions for time systems and reference frames, which are crucial for interpreting the data in SPICE kernels like de430.bsp. It ensures that the time and coordinate information used to calculate the Moon's position is correctly aligned with the global reference systems.

These files are read with the help spiceypy library.

Weather

For weather data, We will be using Visual Crossing Weather API. It provides most if not all necessary data we need for our project.

GUI

At first, im developing an admin dashboard to visualize the data and to ease admin control over the software. We use PyQt5 with folium for this task. The implementation of the GUI is still under development.