hypermate

While the visible night sky appears calm and unchanging, the universe as observed at higher energies (X-rays and gamma-rays) is seething with activity. Many sources are ‘transient’, i.e., quiet for long periods and then becoming active quickly for weeks or months. The high-energy astronomical community is providing information on such sources freely on public web pages, but no tool exists to quickly give an overview of the currently most interesting behaviour in the many sources observed this way. The idea is not to do a deep analysis of the data provided by the community, but to concentrate on a visually pleasing and mobile phone friendly front-end which highlights the ‘most active’ sources in an easy to grasp fashion.

Considerations that we are to committed to:

Team need some experience in development of simple open web app and how to fetch information from websites with standard techniques. The time scale for updates of the input data is between several hours or days and the input data may often be some days old – but can still be interesting. The app must be able to obtain data from the web pages via common standards, e.g. JSON, as applicable. The app should run on commonly used mobile phones without requiring the very latest technology or operating system. Real-life tests are indispensable. The app should make use of the notification mechanisms of the phone’s OS to alert the user to interesting developments. The detailed behaviour should be configurable.

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