Bark-at-the-moon-paranormal-research

For the Boot.dev July 2025 Hackathon!

I run a paranormal group for 15+ years called TOPS. We love using tech to help us in our research. I like to save data on locations and the environment. This small script is to record what the current moon phase in at the location and crime data.

I'm a skeptic and believe "Correlation does not imply causation" but it's still fun to look at the data.

Install

Make your virtual environment

python3 -m venv .venv

Start your virtual environment

source .venv/bin/activate

Install ephem and InquirerPy rich Jinja2

pip install ephem InquirerPy rich Jinja2

Move into the moonphase-cli directory

cd moonphase-cli

Example of location:

/Users/rachael/github/Bark-at-the-moon-paranormal-research/moonphase-cli

Install moonphase-cli

pip install -e .

Run moonphase:

Just type moonphase or watch the video

moonphase

You'll be prompted for date, zipcode, 1 day or 7 days and save html file.

Output

Other options, you can type in a set date:

moonphase --date 2025-07-26 --zip 43016

output:

🌕 Full Moon on 2025-07-26 for Dublin, OH
Illumination: 100.0%
Moonrise: 20:37, Moonset: 06:11
   ○

Run moonphase 7 days example:

moonphase --date 2025-07-26 --zip 43016 --days 7

Moon Phases

Date         Phase               Illumination
------------------------------------------------------
2025-07-20   🌘 Waning Crescent        28.1%
2025-07-21   🌘 Waning Crescent        18.3%
2025-07-22   🌘 Waning Crescent        10.2%
2025-07-23   🌘 Waning Crescent         4.3%
2025-07-24   🌑 New Moon                1.0%
2025-07-25   🌑 New Moon                0.1%
2025-07-26   🌒 Waxing Crescent         1.8%

The Crime data:

please note I ran out of time and can only display data by year.

1. You will need an api key. It is free on Gov api

2. add your api locally

export FBI_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"

This is the source of the crime data FBI Crime data explorer. The api

Here is an example api endpoint

https://api.usa.gov/crime/fbi/sapi/api/summarized/state/{state_abbr}/violent-crime/{start_year}/{end_year}?api_key=YOUR_KEY

Personally I use county level data for research but for the the bootdev hackathon, I wanted to keep it simple.

When we are on an investigation, we run property searches and then you can search for the indicents in the news or county records.

Example of output from the crime api: