Projects related to Physics/Astronomy Outreach

Pan-STARRS colorizer

This tool, written in html/javascript, and hosted on github.io, is used at various astronomy outreach events. It allows the user to create a color image, with sliders to adjust the levels of Red/Green/Blue. The user can select one of 6 areas of sky. These areas of sky were observed by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in 5 different colored filters. By assigning different filters to different R/G/B channels, one can create a color image. The intensity of each color (R/G/B) can also be adjusted. It's a simple interactive tool to show how astronomers make color images from their data.

This image below is an example of what the webpage looks like, when a user has created a color image.



You can try this out for yourself by clicking the link (opens in new tab) ---> https://heatherflew.github.io/ps1astroday/

MegaCam colorizer

This tool, written in html/javascript, and hosted on github.io, is an upgraded version of the Pan-STARRS colorizer. It allows the user to create a color image, with sliders to adjust the levels of Red/Green/Blue. The user can select one of several areas of sky, and can pan and zoom around. These areas of sky were observed by the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in different colored filters. These are single exposures - you can see the chip gaps within the imager. Normally, astronomers will take several exposures, offset in such a way so that when the images are combined, there are no gaps.

This image below is an example of what the webpage looks like, when a user has created a color image and panned and zoomed around.



You can try this out for yourself by clicking the link (opens in new tab) ---> https://heatherflew.github.io/astro_outreach/