Cool Space Things, or n2yovis, is a visualization of satellite launch dates against their apogee/perigee. It encompasses all publically available satellites which have a NORAD ID; these number over 47,000 objects since 1957!
n2yo's dataset is public and freely usable, but we couldn't any documentation about its distribution rights. However, we prepared a tool to capture the data from <n2yo.com> for this project, available here.
If you are examining this project and find it lacking a dataset, follow the
instructions in that project to capture and format your own n2yo.json and
place it in $PWD/app/static/n2yo.json
Ensure Docker is available on your system. If you are running a Windows Home Edition or other non-professional variant of Windows, you should look into Windows Subsystem for Linux!
In $PWD, make start. Then open a browser and navigate to
http://localhost/. Don't forget the dataset: it doesn't come with this
project!
If the application is already running, or has existing build files, you will
nead to respectively make reset or make remove then make start again.
- The bar on the top of the page selects the year to render. It ranges from 1957
to 2021, and defaults to 2020.
- Once you have clicked on the bar or selector on the bar, you can also navigate with the arrow keys.
- The "Graphing Apogee" sign to the right of the bar is a button. It switches
between graphing Apogee and Perigee of all objects in the current year.
- In years where the furthest satellites are particularly distant, you may spot a surprise in the upper right quadrant of the calendar!
- If you hold shift and scroll up with your mouse over the calendar, you'll be
able to zoom in to a high level of detail into any part of the calendar,
dicated by your mouse position. Try zooming into the many satellites
surrounding the Earth- there are more than you think!
- You can zoom back out by again holding shift then scrolling down.
In $PWD, make clean.
- Optimize the dataset to exclude empty keys, saving on app load time
- When hovering over legend elements, highlight matching satellites
- Make the slider and buttons fancier!
- Optimize the behavior and rendering of the calendar for responsiveness
- Correct year text appearance; thin black outline is missing?
- Use a CSS library for formatting the slider bar so its appearance is more consistent on both Chrome and Firefox
- When mousing over satellites, move them apart from one another so they are individually accessible
- Add an upload script to make updating the app easier
- Reduce the number of Make targets, avoiding redundancy
authors:
- Gregory Danielson III (@gregdan3, gregdan3@protonmail.com)
- Jonathan Frees (@jmfrees, jmfrees@uab.edu)