My Luna

Develop an interactive app for children that uses smart phone and tablet sensory to locate the Moon (any time of the day, even below horizon), which unlocks current lunar data (phase, distance, etc), and then presents the user options for reading a "Moon" related story, view space agency photos and videos, and/or fun facts about the Moon. The goal of this challenge is edutainment and raising awareness about lunar missions around the world.

MyLuna is a virtual-reality capable iPad app for children and anyone who's curious to know about Earth's lone natural satellite , the Moon. Users will either hold the iPad or mount it on VR headgear like the AirVR with its back facing the sky, and find the moon by following the directional arrows on-screen. Once the iPad has been oriented with sufficient accuracy as to bring the moon into view on the screen, the user fine tunes the orientation, attempting to position the moon in the centre of the screen where a net is waiting to capture it. Once captured, the moon is locked and the screen fades out to reveal multimedia panes.

These multimedia panes are interactive text, video, graphics shipped with the app and from all over the internet. In the prototype app, the panes have static content, serving only to illustrate the concept.

The prototype app submitted in this challenge contains a fully functional algorithm to locate the moon in the sky, as can be seen from the video. The app uses positional astronomy to determine the moon's altitude and azimuth from the user’s location and current time. These are converted into screen coordinates, positioning a representation of the moon in the center of the screen when the Apple logo on the back of the iPad is pointed directly at the moon.

Computing Planetary Positions (http://stjarnhimlen.se/comp/ppcomp.html)

Mooncalc.org (to test app locator logic - PASSED :)

4 arcminute moon position algorithm (www.stargazing.net)

Converting right ascension/declination to azimuth/altitude (http://www.stargazing.net/kepler/altaz.html)

iOS documentation (especially Core Motion, Core Location)

NASA website on the Moon (snipped some pics as demo content for the app)