Gaia Planetarium

[!NOTE]
This is an entry into the InterSystems Employee Programming contest, 2026

Welcome to the Gaia Planetarium - a project which combines InterSystems PyProd with a WSGI hosted Flask web application, to create a planetarium of the night sky above us.

To get started, clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/isc-ging/gaia-planetarium.git
cd gaia-planetarium

Then build and start the container:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d 

Upon starting the container, the ./startup.sh script will run (its a custom entrypoint to the container). This script runs /iris-main to start up iris, then waits for IRIS to start before starting the production and loading the data.

The production does several things:
- Processes all the EpochPhotometry files to find all the stars who’s flux has changed by more than 100% and outputs them to a CSV File (the contest challenge)
- Fetches the location of each of these stars from the Gaia Source dataset
- Fetches the top 500 stars by magnitude (brightness) from the Gaia Source dataset
- Loads stellarium data on constellations and star names
- Loads missing stars from the Hipparcos dataset.

The production can also be activated from the web application to fetch more stars for the night sky via Flask.

There is then a web-application registered at http://localhost:32783/planetarium/ . Visit this to explore the night sky!

The photometry data is available as an overlay coloured by flux. This data only covers a very small portion of the sky, and thus may not be visible at a particular location and time.

For more information or discussion, see the corresponding article on the developer community.