Sky Banana Party

See the app at http://skybanana.party/! (Note: it will not work over HTTPS — only plain HTTP for now ☹)

A website that shows recent LIGO events on the sky. It's got a silly name, but the hope is that it will show how to create a simple web app that uses WorldWide Telescope technology to power a nice, interactive all-sky visualization of astronomical data.

This project was started during the AAS233 Hack Together Day, but only the barest progress was made that day. Getting nice localization sky maps out of LIGO data turned out to be harder than anticipated!

Technical Overview

The frontend of the website as seen by users is simple static content that’s stored in frontend/. It’s very quick to create a WWT control, and then there’s some custom JavaScript to download the LIGO event data and render them in the WWT framework. The frontend is served off of Google Cloud Storage.

The frontend makes API calls against a backend that provides programmatic access to a small database. The backend runs in Google App Engine, simply because it’s a system with which the author was familiar. The main implementation is in backend/main.py. It’s relatively simple, and just provides a small API for retrieving data about LIGO events and their localizations.

The idea is that when LIGO is running, the app will show events as they occur. But in the meantime, we have to show something. The directory bootstrap/ has code to bootstrap the event database with data from the LIGO O1/O2 Catalog.

Legalities

Copyright 2019 Peter K. G. Williams. Licensed under the MIT license.