Setara

Setara is a Discord bot built for students preparing for astronomy and astrophysics olympiads, turning the often-daunting task of memorizing the night sky into an interactive study companion. The name comes from the Persian ستاره (setāreh), meaning "star" — a word that carries through into Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali poetic traditions, and the bot's visual identity, with its astrolabe motif and gold-and-indigo palette, draws on that same Indo-Persian heritage of celestial navigation and stargazing.

At its core, Setara is a constellation and deep-sky object (DSO) identification trainer. Drop into a server channel and the bot serves up a constellation chart or a Messier object image, asking players to name what they're looking at. Rather than a single repetitive quiz, Setara rotates through several distinct challenge types on the constellation side: identifying a constellation purely from its star-chart image, matching its English common name to the correct Latin designation, matching a Bangla name to that same Latin form, and a black-and-white version of the chart that strips away color cues and forces pure pattern recognition. On the deep-sky side, players identify Messier catalogue objects from an image pool split into Easy and Hard difficulty tiers, and separately match English names to the correct catalogue entry.

For group study sessions, s.race turns a channel into a live, fast-paced scoring arena. The bot posts the rules, a five-second countdown runs on s.start, and from that point every message sent in the channel — no command prefix needed — counts as a guess. The first player to reach seven correct answers wins the round, a majority-vote skip lets the group move past a stubborn image, and s.score keeps a running leaderboard so regular players can track participation over time.

Underneath the quizzes, Setara includes the small touches that make an ID bot pleasant to use day to day: s.hint for a nudge when a round stalls, s.skip to move on, and answer-checking that's forgiving of accents and minor typos while still requiring full constellation names where a single word (like "Major" or "Ursa") would otherwise be ambiguous. All images are delivered as genuine Discord file attachments rather than external links, drawn from a curated library sourced from IAU constellation charts and the SEDS Messier database.

Built and maintained by a single developer, Setara is designed with room to grow — its layered engine, mode, and subject architecture means new quiz categories can be added without rewriting the core, so constellations and Messier objects are just where the journey starts.