Hello Coders,
After visualizing Orion, I wanted to try to create a visualization of the Ursa Major constellation, as I was named after one of the stars in it (Talita 
). I was inspired by @camb5, who made a great visualization of Leo (their post here: Orion Constellation Project).
I’m having trouble with my z-axis, though. My 3d scatter plot appears flat, like I’m rotating around a 2d scatter plot. Why is this, when my data for the z-axis has a wide range? Also, the data points in the 3d plot are dots of varying sizes – I don’t know why. Can anyone provide some insight?
Thanks for checking my project out!
#Set-Up
%matplotlib notebook
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
# Ursa Major Data
x_uma = [8.5, 9.52, 11.5, 12.25, 12.9, 13.38, 13.78, 11.88, 11.02, 9.83, 9.53, 8.98, 9.05, 11.77, 11.15, 10.37, 10.28, 11.3]
y_uma = [60.72, 63.05, 61.75, 57.02, 55.95, 54.92, 49.3, 53.68, 56.37, 59.03, 51.67, 48.03, 47.15, 47.77, 44.48, 41.48, 42.9, 33.08]
z_uma = [197.2, 76.8, 122.8, 81, 82.5, 81.5, 103.9, 83.1, 79.7, 112.1, 45.3, 46.2, 358.2, 193.2, 154.9, 230.2, 137.4, 23.7]
# Ursa Major 2D Visualization
fig_uma = plt.figure()
fig_uma.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
plt.scatter(x_uma,y_uma, color='purple')
plt.title('Ursa Major Constellation in 2D', color='purple')
plt.xlabel('Projected Right Ascension')
plt.ylabel('Projected Declination')
plt.show()
# Ursa Major 3D Visualization
fig_uma_3d = plt.figure()
ax_uma = fig_uma_3d.add_subplot(1,1,1,projection='3d')
uma_constellation3d = plt.scatter(x_uma,y_uma,z_uma, color='purple')
plt.title('Ursa Major Constellation in 3D', color='purple')
ax_uma.set_xlabel('Projected Right Ascension')
ax_uma.set_ylabel('Projected Declination')
ax_uma.set_zlabel('Distance (light years)')
plt.show()
