Open Sky Planetarium
About Project:
This is a novel project which aims at providing access to low-cost planetariums, especially to schools. The idea is to control a laser pointing device which flashes a laser beam at the night sky, guiding the position of the object of interest in the sky. So unlike the usual planetariums, there is no dome screen. The actual night sky is used as a dome screen. The laser pointing device is interfaced to and commanded using Stellarium, an open source planetarium software, using a software plug-in created by our team. It also helps play an audio script describing the stars and their patterns in the sky along with the associated stories. Thus, a moving laser beam along with the related audio can facilitate a one man show for the school teachers or demonstrators at an affordable price.
Mentor’s View:
“The project had a total of three interns, divided as two interns for hardware team and one intern for software team. Jaideep and Ram Mohan were a part of the hardware team. Saloni Mudra was the only software intern. They were a lot of help to come up with new innovative ideas and also to implement the planned ideas seamlessly. The hardware team build circuits and proposed some rather easy solutions to existing problems and shortcomings. The software team implemented new functionalities to suite the hardware design and also to operate the device with much ease.
-Rupak Rokade (Assistant Project Manager at FOSSEE)
FOSSEE Intern:
“I learnt a lot of new things as part of my Summer internship at FOSSEE. Not only did it provide me a platform to learn new tools and technologies, but also taught me some crucial social skills of teamwork and collaboration.”
-Saloni Mudra (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology)
“A very interesting idea with noble motive ”