Side projects. Something small just for fun? Educational website? A place to check out new technology? Let me introduce you to Daily Photo from NASA Archives (sorry, I'm no good with names...) - my little project that brings NASA photos closer to Facebook users.
source: https://unsplash.com/photos/0o_GEzyargo
A side project is a good way to sharpen your skills, do something cool, bring cool little features or some fun to the people. In this article, I will go through the idea behind one of my projects - Daily Photo from NASA Archives.
First of all, I'm a huge fan of astronomy, cosmos, NASA and all related things. I follow a lot of pages that are related to these topics, mostly on Facebook. I read a lot about that. For me, it is absolutely fascinating subject, and as you already know, it is great to work on something that you're truly passionate about.
The project started with a Facebook (?) post about NASA APIs. In general, what resources NASA gives access to - you can find the list here. My first thought was like:
This huge organization has to have a lot of cool data to use in some way.
And probably the simplest and easier to show people is data from NASA Image and Video Library - in short pictures NASA accumulated over the years.
source: https://unsplash.com/photos/OHOU-5UVIYQ
You may be familiar with something called APOD - Astronomy Picture of the Day. The page (and there is also API available) that publishes one astronomy picture daily. This site shows its users a photo that is purely related to astronomy - photos of the moon, galaxies, etc. Image Library, on the other hand, has also many photos related to the everyday job of the agency.
I decided to put this API to good use.
Let's be honest - the most popular photos are iconic, however, there are thousands of photos that remain unknown. My goal is to show them to people so they can be closer to this awesome idea of space exploration, not only on astronomical but also on agency level showing the everyday job of hundreds of people.
After some time I managed to write the application that performs all the actions automatically. It randomly gets a photo every day at 6 PM. You can find the result on Facebook and there is also a simple page presenting today's photo.
This has been operational for a couple of months now and provides a variety of pictures. Each post contains the picture itself but also a title, description, create date and some additional data provided by NASA.
You can find there:
Mars surface scan
Engineers at work
and even photos from competition to create recipes for food to feed astronauts in space.
As you can see there are a lot of things that wait to be discovered. If you like, consider following the page - I'll greatly appreciate that! :) In the next post, I'll discuss the technology behind the project.
Side projects can be fun. Even if no one is interested in the results - you'll benefit greatly from going through the whole process of creating applications. I found something that entertained me and brought me a source of knowledge. I also managed to learn something new in terms of coding. If you have some spare time, don't hesitate - start a side project and show it to the world!
DPFNA on Facebook
DPFNA website