sky-watchers

BACKGROUND

Taivaanvahti is a database for gathering amateurs’ observations of astronomical and atmospherical phenomena. It combines Finnish observations of storms, northern lights, galaxies, fireballs, halos, comets and planets under one single website available for everyone interested in space and meteorology: www.taivaanvahti.fi Taivaanvahti receives approximately 9 000 observations a year.

CHALLENGE

We developed on-field reporting platform for spreading the word and pictures about ongoing sky phenomena. Rare event like auroras, storms and fireballs are chased by enthusiastic sky spotters that could drive kilometers for them. These amateur discovers are significant use to scientists and the benefit increases with more observers. With our platform observers can capture these phenomenons with their mobile devices and share the information in Taivaanvahti- webpage alerting other users near by. More detailed information and high quality pictures can be added later. Taivaanvahti currently has several individually made mobile clients for browsing the observations, but none for sending those.

FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION

Our application is mobile-optimized HTML5 submission form for the system. The application is focused on gathering observations from the area of Finland, but can be extended all over the world. The for is constructed from a JSON files provided by Ursa.

Project Information

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