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Presentation notes
We wanted to develop a program that would give people an easy way to find out whether anything interesting will be happening in the sky tonight, and whether the sky will be clear enough for them to see it.
The Exeter Team decided to start off on a simple use case - we'd show ISS over-flights for a location and combine that with weather forecast information to produce a prediction of whether or not the ISS would be visible.
The designers on the team worked on sketching out the front-end and the user interactions while the developers concentrated on the back-end. Once the back-end code was ready some developers started to work on iOS and Android apps.
The prototype back-end code uses the Unofficial Heavens Above API to pull predicted ISS overflights for the specified location . It pulls forecast data for the same location from the Met Office DataPoint. It has to do some processing on the weather types because we're interested in quite broad conditions (cloudy, partially cloudy, clear), but the forecast has many more types of weather. It merges these together to produce an XML list of events. A demonstration web site is available at: http://www.adamretter.org.uk/spaceapps/space.xql. Documentation is available at https://github.com/MetOfficeSpaceApps/PredictTheSky/blob/master/backend/README.md
We're trying to get more events into the feed - we'd like to get ISS data for more days, but there's some problems with their web interface that's making that difficult. We're also working on meteor showers and aurorae.
Temp link to Angela's Exeter Web Devs presentation http://dl.dropbox.com/u/65407155/PredictTheSky.key