In a terminal window:

cd /path/to/app  # OUTER folder, containing run.command
bash run.command # must write here; double-clicking the file does not seem to work

This (should) do everything from creating a venv and downloading all the packages to starting each subshell process. They will keep going in the background, so if they need to be stopped, double-click on stop.command

Once the message

 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

appears (after a few seconds while the up-to-date database downloads), open a browser and head to 127.0.0.1:5000/home

(If it takes a while to run it is likely downloading many images from the internet (check in app/app/static for new files); it will not take this long on subsequent startups)

It should be safe to close the terminal window and have everything still run in the background, so double-click on stop.command if you actually need the processes to stop

This browser-based app is the result of an MPhys project undertaken at The University of Manchester in 2019/2020 by Sam Frost and James Berezowski, supervised by Dr. Eamonn Kerins. Hundreds to thousands of exoplanets are discovered every year, and many deserve further observations for study. However, previous observations of this sort were chosen by hand. It is now clear with the increasing numbers of planets being found that a way of automating this process must be developed. The team at SPEARNET have developed a decision metric based on the signal-to-noise ratio for a given planet observation. During the project we validated assumptions made by this metric and suggested improvements, including use of a new mass-radius relation, and have produced ranked tables with metrics calculated from the exoplanet.eu archive. Images are provided by ESO Online Digitized Sky Survey.

The app returns a list of planets, ranked by decision metric for a given telescope (choose from a list or input details for your own). The metric attempts to show which planets should return a high signal-to-noise ratio when observed, effectively showing which planets would be 'easiest' to observe. If a user wants to plan an observation during a specific window, options exist to eliminate the list to only those planets visible during the window, given the location of the telescope.

As a convenience, we include graph plotting tools, similar to those found on exoplanet.eu or Filtergraph, with a few extra features they do not offer.

The project owes a debt of gratitude to Miguel Grinberg, whose tutorials on flask and celery were invaluable. The run-redis.sh file is taken directly from his flask-celery-example.