🌌 Constellation‑Playground

An experimental project built to learn how to integrate 3rd‑party APIs, work with Streamlit, and explore basic data visualization techniques.

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🚀 Features

• 📍 Location Autocomplete via Google Places API
• 📅 Date Picker for choosing any night in history or future
• 🌠 Constellation Star Charts powered by AstronomyAPI
• 🔭 Interactive Polar Plots of planet positions
• 🪐 Moon Phase & Planetary Positions tabs (coming soon)

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🎯 Learning Goals

1. API Integration: Handling OAuth/basic auth, GET/POST, error handling
2. State Management: Using st.session_state in Streamlit
3. Data Parsing & Visualization: JSON → pandas → Plotly/Matplotlib
4. UI/UX: Designing a responsive, two‑column layout in Streamlit

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🖼️ Screenshots

star‑chart of selected constellation

Heliocentric polar plot, zoomable via slider

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📦 Getting Started (Running Locally)

1. Clone

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/constellation-playground.git
cd constellation-playground

2. Create a .env

APP_ID=your_astronomyapi_app_id
APP_SECRET=your_astronomyapi_app_secret
GOOGLE_API_KEY=your_google_maps_api_key

3. Install requirements.txt

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Run streamlit program

Basic

streamlit run streamlit_constellation_map.py #Default

With Custom Options (ensures updates on save, prevents new tab from opening for each run)

streamlit run streamlit_constellation_map.py --server.headless true --server.fileWatcherType=poll # Helps show updates on save, avoid popping new tabs each time command is ran

You can also save these settings in a config file

# .streamlit/config.toml
[server]
headless = true
port = 8503
fileWatcherType = "poll"