ClearSpace

Home Page
Interactive Simulation
Save the Sky

Inspiration

In many places around the world, including where we live, it’s difficult to see even just a few stars, making light pollution a serious problem for millions of people. We wanted to educate people on light pollution and spread awareness of what each individual can do to reduce their effect so that the night sky is visible to all of us.

What it does

This website’s main purpose is to educate people about light pollution and its effects on the night sky. It provides you with an interactive simulation with real-world scenarios that allow you to see first-hand the consequences or benefits of your decisions. There is a light pollution map that makes use of the GeoLocator API to accurately pinpoint your current location and show you where you are on a map of light pollution to see how your area is doing when it comes to managing light pollution. There is a night sky simulator that allows you to see what the sky would look like with no light pollution, extreme light pollution, and everything in between.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to make the website. For the map, we used the GeoLocator API and a helpful tutorial by Blaurt on converting the latitude and longitude coordinates to points on a map. (https://github.com/blaurt/map-app-v1)

Challenges we ran into

Getting an accurate map location was a struggle, but we are pretty happy with how the end map turned out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One aspect of the website we’re very proud of is the overall aesthetic. We took a lot of time designing and styling it, and it came out well. Another feature we took a lot of time to finish was the map. We had never worked with geolocators before, so it was a new experience and we learned a lot.

What we learned

We learned a lot about light pollution while working on this website. Something that surprised us was how it’s possible for the issue to be completely solved if everyone was just more mindful about the light they used. We also obtained more programming skills, such as getting the user’s location from a website.