About AstroDelta

“All men by nature desire to know.” - Aristotle, Metaphysics

A simple quote, yet one that rings true. There's a human curiosity about the stars. The planets, the vastness of it all. Yet, turning that curiosity into understanding requires information to be accessible and clear. There's an inherent value, I believe, in things that are aesthetically pleasing. It often goes hand-in-hand with clarity and understanding. This principle shouldn't stop at software. It should be fundamental to the design of any product, especially when we're dealing with something as inherently information dense as space data.

Too often, however, the software we use to explore this data falls short. Frankly, they can be a mess. We encounter interfaces cluttered with jargon, designs that disregard basic readability and accessibility, or experiences that simply don't work properly on different devices. This is more than poor aesthetics, it actively frustrates that natural desire to know.

AstroDelta is my ongoing effort to build an alternative. It serves, firstly, as a platform for continuously honing my frontend development skills – particularly with Next.js, TypeScript, and modern UI paradigms – but its core function is intended to be more considered. The aim is to create an interactive platform that facilitates understanding. The goal is to present accurate, timely space information in a clean, visually engaging, and intuitive way, respecting both the data and the user's desire to learn.

My own interest in space stretches back to childhood (yeah yeah we've heard it all before), made all the more interesting by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. While I'm more interested in phenomena like black holes, relativity, the fabric of the universe, building this project has given me a much deeper appreciation for the intricacies and sheer engineering involved in rocket launches. Deciphering the API data to render the launch tracker was in and of itself an exercise in learning the jargon!