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Showing posts from April 18, 2021

A NASA TV Still Frame Viewer in Python

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I wrote Spacestills , a Python program for viewing NASA TV still frames. The main window of Spacestills running on Replit. As a hobbyist wishing to improve my Python programming skills, for some time I’ve wanted to work on learning projects more substantial than code snippets , throwaway tools, or short scripts. Spacestillschecks several boxes. The problem domain is one of my primary interests, space exploration. At about 350 lines of code, it’s a non-trivial system with a GUI. It accesses the network to download data from the web. Finally, the program relies on a few Python libraries. About the program Spacestills periodically downloads NASA TV still frames from a web feed and displays them in a GUI. The program allows to correct the aspect ratio of the frames and save them in PNG format. It downloads the latest frame automatically and gives the option to reload manually, disable the automatic reload, or change the download frequency. As a learning exercise, Spacestillsis a basic pro