Category: Sugar Labs

Constellation Activity is my first ever Sugarizer Activity. It has been a year since it was added on Sugarizer (time flew so fast!).

Do check it out on: https://try.sugarizer.org/

What is Constellation Activity?

Constellation Activity is a web-based, 3D planetarium where users can see the constellations, stars, and planets in their current position in the sky. It shows where they are positioned on a particular day and time, and from which place the user is currently staying.

The Star Chart, which shows the constellation, stars and planets, can be changed in a different projection. There are currently 8 projection available, namely: Stereo, Ortho, Mollweide, Fisheye, Lambert, Equirectangular, Gnomic and Polar. It can be changed by clicking the “Projection View” dropdown button.

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This was added as one of the enhancement for the activity, and to also allow the users to choose the Star Chart view that they are most comfortable with.

Aside from Projections, another enhancement added for this activity is detecting user’s location. The user can either choose from a limited list of countries in the “World List” Dropdown to see what the sky view is on the chosen country, or they can set the location to where they are currently staying by clicking the “Set to My Location” button. It will then set the star chart base on longitude and latitude.

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“Set to My Location” is more specific in getting the longitude and latitude of the user’s location. However, I still added “World List” for users to be able to see the different sky view in other countries, without specifying its exact location.

Another feature of this activity is that the user can add or minus a day to see the sky view previously or afterward. They also have the ability to toggle star names and constellation lines.

Project Reflection

I remember thinking about this because I noticed that Sugarizer doesn’t have an astronomy related activity. Being someone who likes astronomy during high school, I was inspired to do this project to better help students and users appreciate the beauty of the night sky even without a proper instrument like a telescope. Though books can only take students so far, having an interactive platform for them to explore makes learning fun and engaging.

Doing this project also helped me improve my JavaScript programming language. In all honesty, I learned JavaScript more by doing constellation activity 😂. It’s one of the challenges I ran into while doing this project. Another challenge I faced is that this is my first, “real” project to an open source , so it took quite some time getting used to the environment and work space. Reading other developers’ codes is no joke, by the way.

It is also nice and satisfying to think that your work or project will be used and maybe even help other people. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy writing codes 💖.

Once again, do check out constellation activity or if you are a developer or interested in improving this project, visit Sugarizer’s updated version of the activity: https://github.com/llaske/sugarizer