Eschatia: Devlog 1

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has some of the most detailed images of the universe ever taken, but the best experience for those who are not scientists is only the JPEG image with a caption.

The idea of Eschatia is to create a more interactive way to view these images in the web portal, where users can pick a destination and get full information and narration about the JWST’s greatest images in plain English.

Before writing any code, I spent some time figuring out what info NASA made available to developers. I was able to find huge images on ESA’s servers with key images like the Carina Nebula available with over 100 megapixels and metadata. This made it really easy to make the experience interactive, as users can zoom into these images deeply without the quality being compromised. Finding this was the major change that made the whole project possible without any custom infrastructure, etc.

After I started building, the trickiest part to figure out was an entry transition. When you click a destination card, the app captures the card’s exact position on screen and animates it expanding to fill the entire viewport before cutting to the viewer. Making it smooth was difficult, and it’s still not perfect yet, but I will improve it after the initial MVP of the product with all the features has been created.

The website skeleton, transition, and viewer with some images are all live right now at eschatia.vercel.app

There is a full viewer and narration for 3 of the destinations. Next up is making the images more interactive with clickable regions that have more narration, and adding in more images that viewers can view, along with making sure that all the buttons on the website work.