Astrophysics Dashboard

Table of Contents

• About
• Project Setup
• Dependencies
• Execution

About

A dashboard style interactive web application for visualizing astrophysics data, to aid in exoplanets discovery.

This application is similar to one I made for the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences / Astrophysics Centre of the University of Porto. Comparing to the original one, this application has some details modified to not use their intellectual property. The original one accesses their API for data, whilst this one uses a different data source.

Project Setup

General GUI setup

The app contains 3 views:

• Home view: description of the app.
• Dashboard view: main funcionality view, with all data visualization resources.
• Sourcepath management view: view to add and remove sourcepaths to the Dashboard.

Directories structure

• / : root directory of the project, with the Python application. Also contains the project's metadata files, and configuration files.
• /static : all static assets, such as images, icons, Javascript and CSS files.
• /templates : templates for the views using mainly HTML and Jinja.

Techstack

Made in Python, it uses Plotly Dash for the data visualization elements and UI, Pandas for data manipulation, Flask microframework as the web server gateway interface (WSGI). It uses Jinja, HTML, JavaScript, and is styled with CSS (Bootstrap 5 and Dash Bootstrap). For more details, see Dependencies.

• Python (3.9.18)
• Flask
• Plotly Dash
• Pandas
• Bootstrap

Dependencies

Getting Started with Plotly Dash

Plotly Dash framework is used for data visualization UI items. Using Plotly (5.22.0) and Dash (2.17.1).

Getting Started with Flask

Web framework used was Flask (3.0.2). Application uses Jinja (3.1.3) templating.

Getting Started with Pandas

Data manipulation uses Pandas (2.2.2).

Getting Started with Bootstrap

Styled with Bootstrap 5. Also uses Dash Bootstrap Components (1.6.0) and Dash Bootstrap Templates (1.1.2).

Execution

• export FLASK_APP=app.py
• flask run --port 5001, to run on a different port, change the port number.