Almagest

Plan your stargazing.

Almagest is a simple tool to help plan stargazing or astrophotography outings. The web app provides light pollution data, sunrise and sunset times, moonrise and moonset times, and forecast data in one place, alleviating the hassle of checking multiple sites.

Using Almagest

A simple three-step process

1. Drop a marker on the map where you want to stargaze

   • You can search for a city to jump to a location and drag the map to explore the light pollution contours
   • Drop your marker by clicking, and you can drag it for precision placement

2. Select a date using the calendar input

   • Date selected must be within 10 days due to forecast limitations
   • Safari users must manually enter the date as yyyy-mm-dd (At the time of writing Safari does not support input type="date")

3. Check conditions

   • Clicking the Check Conditions button pulls data for your marker location on the date you selected

Stargazing 101

• The Stargazing 101 section provides additional information, and additional sources of information, for users who may be new to stargazing or interested in astrophotography.

Technologies Used

Almagest is a simple, single page app using just HTML, CSS, and jQuery to get and display data from three APIs, and uses a ground overlay to display light pollution data on the map.

API List

• Google Maps
• Google Places
• AERIS Weather

Ground Overlay with Google Maps

The light pollution data uses semi-transparent PNGs as Ground Overlays. The overlay is from The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness.

Feedback?

This is a living project, so I'd love to hear from you. I have a lot of ideas for future iterations, so if there's anything you love, hate, or think would be helpful to have, feel free to shoot me a message. It will help me prioritize :-)

Enjoy the stars! - A