Dark Sky Finder

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One reason I was very excited to move to Arizona was the low light pollution and the high number of good-weather days. I found a project by Jonathan Tomshine that showed light pollution tiles overlaying a Google Map, but under the map, he indicated that he was interested in having someone take over the code (this was before an apparent server crash that wiped everything out on his end).

I was interested in poking around the code, so I took a look at it and decided to create my own user interface for the map, since the original was almost completely unstyled. The original application had a dark sky site marker database, populated by users, that marked particular places suited for skywatching, but I didn't really have need of this and neglected to include it in my version. This was in the summer of 2013.

In early 2019, I stumbled upon my implementation of the code and saw that the Google Maps API I had been using was out of date (possibly using code that was twelve years old), breaking the map and light pollution tiles. I rewrote the original code to use the new Google Maps API and ES6 syntax and cleaned up the code a bit, making it more readable and renaming variables. There are some performance issues to tackle related to rendering quite a few 500px square tiles while keeping animations and scrolling smooth.