Stuart Lowe

With a background in radio astronomy, I have worked on ESA's Planck satellite, LCOGT's global network of optical telescopes, co-written a book of astronomical infographics, written Javascript for Aperio Software, and worked with open data for ten years at Open Innovations. I can be found coding, cycling, tooting and other things. I'm based in Yorkshire. Here are some of the other things I've done...

Archived

  • 2013-25parkweather
    Display the weather history for UK parkrun events. Uses hourly data provided by the MET Office. Created with perl.

    • data

  • Interplanetary Lobbing
    The Expensive Hardware Lob League covers interplanetary lobbing matches held between planets in the Solar System.

  • 2007-2023 @apod
    In 2007 I set up the Astronomy Picture of the Day Twitter account to post daily (now twice daily) tweets to APODs.

    • web
    • data
    • APIs

  • Wakefield & North of England Tulip Society
    I automated the cleaning of 85 years worth of transcribed meeting minutes. This involved lots of regex, manual cleaning, and output in a format to load into their WordPress site. I also made a search interface.

    • perl
    • regex
    • search

  • 2015Leeds Hex Map
    A Leeds ward map made from CSS hexagons. It is a proof of concept. It currently loads data from Leeds Data Mill
    Source code

    • CSS
    • javascript

  • 2015-9stuQuery
    jQuery was getting too big for me so I made a lightweight replacement that does most of the DOM manipulation that I want. Heavily inspired by You Might Not Need jQuery.
    Source code

    • javascript
    • SVG

  • 2009-2021lookUP
    This web service looks up the details of astronomical objects by name. Get results as a webpage, XML, JSON or on your iPhone. It makes Simbad, NED, SkyBot etc more usable.

    • web services
    • data

  • 2015-2019Seldom Sirius
    I co-presented an astronomy podcast. I have automated the process of generating the MP3s and RSS feeds for the finished audio.

    • perl
    • command-line
    • RSS
    • AWS
    • audio

  • 2015UK Hex Map
    A UK constituency map made from CSS hexagons. This is more representative of population than a usual geographic map i.e. Scotland has a similar population to Yorkshire.
    Source code

    • CSS
    • data

  • Route Rater
    Developing from an idea at the ODI Leeds #hackmyroute hack day. This aims to make a crowd-sourced cycle grading map
    Route Rater code

  • 2014Space Telescope Designer
    A web-ification of a schools project originally implemented in Excel by Chris North. Also available in a more advanced mode for older pupils with more options and a more realistic use of risk. In Javascript with Raphael.js and responsive styling.
    Space Telescope Designer code

    • javascript
    • SVG
    • responsive design
    • canvas

  • 2014Multi-wavelength Universe
    An interactive astronomical game to teach people how different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum can reveal different aspects of astrophysics.
    Multi-wavelength Universe code

    • javascript

  • 2013Messier Bingo
    A bingo game based around the Messier catalogue of astronomical objects. An implementation of an idea by Ed Gomez. Uses jQuery and Raphael.js.
    Messier Bingo code

    • javascript
    • SVG

  • 2013Cosmic Microwave Background Simulator
    See how the ingredients of the Universe affect the CMB. Created for the RS Summer Exhibition 2013. Uses jQuery UI, Raphael.js, <canvas> & an FFT library.
    Simulator code

    • javascript
    • canvas
    • SVG
    • FFT

  • 2011Star in a Box
    An interactive Hertzsprung-Russell diagram created with Jon Yardley, Haley Gomez and Ed Gomez. Uses jQuery and Raphael.js. Includes support for multiple languages.
    SIAB code

    • javascript
    • SVG

  • 2011 Paper Planck
    Make your own paper (or card) model of the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. I designed the templates. Uses actual paper.

    • graphics

  • 2010-2Agent Exoplanet
    Interactive site to measure the brightness of a star with a transiting planet. Uses jQuery, <canvas> and Raphael.js.

  • SpaceBuzz
    A toy I made to display the currently popular tags being used within the astronomy blogosphere.

  • .Astronomy
    The most exciting astronomy-internet-related conference of the year! I was on the organising committee for the .Astronomy events in Leiden, Oxford & Heidelberg.

  • 2005-2010Jodcast
    A twice-monthly astronomy podcast featuring the latest news, interviews and the night sky. I was a co-founder and helped run it for 4.5 years. I have now retired.

  • FITS extraction with Javascript
    Use Javascript to display a FITS file in a web browser.
    jsFITS code

  • AVM Javascript Library
    Use Javascript to extract information from the AVM tags in the headers of astronomical jpegs.

  • 2009-11365 Days of Astronomy
    During 2009, 2010 and 2011 I created the weekly omnibus edition of the podcast using Perl and Sox.

  • Astronomy Media Player
    My attempt to bring all the astronomy podcasts into one place. It has since been superceded by Portal to the Universe.