The visualization of astronomical data is a crucial component to analyzing asteroids,
stars, and other objects. Without visualization tools for analysis, researchers need to
comb through thousands of data points by hand, making the ability to see patterns and
develop trends complicated. This project is intended to help researchers visualize
and analyze the large amounts of data hosted in Northern Arizona University's servers. The current methodology
researchers use involves time intensive analysis that focuses on individual data points
rather than larger trends and outliers.
The solution is a web application that can pull large amounts of data and visualize it in graphs,
heat maps, and other visualizations in order to help researchers understand the data they
are looking at. The web application gives insight to outliers, trends, and distributions
that will provide better understanding of what the data means. The functional and non-functional
requirements outlined on this website provide not only the technical requirements that the web
application meets but also an outline of the roadmap the team followed throughout capstone. The team is
very pleased with what they have developed and has picked up many valuable skills in the process, both on the development and business sides.
The team is also very excited that the clients and alike researchers now have a new tool capable of visualizing vast amounts of astronomical data
High Level Requirements
Visualizations of large percentages of the observations in the database - A high-level representation of the database should be readily available to users.
Interactivity among large data visualizations - Data points should be able to be selected out of a large representation of data.
Ease of use - Product should provide ease of use when navigating different data on web pages. Product needs to be simplistic in nature so as to not overwhelm users.
Filtering the data - Datasets should be able to be filtered and visualized on the basis of different characteristics such as magnitudes.
Tracking asteroids over time - Asteroids should have the ability to be saved by a user to serve as a consistent reference point.
Widely accessible - Product needs to be web-based to provide access to anyone who wishes to view and/or interact with the data.
Up-to-date data - Product needs to display the most current observations possible as new astronomical data is to be generated on a daily basis.
