Orion Constellation Project

object6245509428 · August 12, 2020, 10:07pm

blakelucey/CA---Constellation/blob/master/constellation.ipynb

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    "## Project: Visualizing the Orion Constellation\n",
    "\n",
    "In this project you are Dr. Jillian Bellovary, a real-life astronomer for the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. As an astronomer, part of your job is to study the stars. You've recently become interested in the constellation Orion, a collection of stars that appear in our night sky and form the shape of [Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)), a warrior God from ancient Greek mythology. \n",
    "\n",
    "As a researcher on the Hayden Planetarium team, you are in charge of visualizing the Orion constellation in 3D using the Matplotlib function `.scatter()`. To learn more about the `.scatter()` you can see the Matplotlib documentation [here](https://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.scatter.html). \n",
    "\n",
    "You will create a rotate-able visualization of the position of the Orion's stars and get a better sense of their actual positions. To achieve this, you will be mapping real data from outer space that maps the position of the stars in the sky\n",
    "\n",
    "The goal of the project is to understand spatial perspective. Once you visualize Orion in both 2D and 3D, you will be able to see the difference in the constellation shape humans see from earth versus the actual position of the stars that make up this constellation. \n",
    "\n",
    "<img src=\"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Orion_constellation_with_star_labels.jpg\" alt=\"Orion\" style=\"width: 400px;\"/>\n",
    "\n"
   ]
  },

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This is the Constellation Project I completed. Please take a look, any feedback you might have is appreciated. I was interested if there is a better way to make the points in the 3D graph more visible.

Thanks!

tgrtim · August 13, 2020, 10:33am

It’d be best to get in the habit of adding labels to all your axes now. Without them it takes the viewer much longer to interpret your data.

Please also have a close look at the z-axis of your points. I believe they all sit at z=0.0 which is not correct. Using the standard matplotlib.pyplot.sctatter() function only allows for 2D plotting.

You need to be using the .scatter() method of your 3D axis object which supports z data…

ax3dobj = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1,projection="3d")
ax3dobj.scatter(...

For increasing visibility the first step would be to increase marker size which can be done with by adding the keyword parameter s=20 to the function call (20 might not be right, play around with that value a little). You could then try altering marker shape and colour to see if it helped, the documentation should provide you with the methods to do so-
https://matplotlib.org/3.3.0/api/_as_gen/mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axes3d.Axes3D.html#mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axes3d.Axes3D.scatter

davidutomi · August 14, 2020, 4:00am

Thanks a lot. I implemented your suggestions on my code and can see the difference.

object6245509428 · August 14, 2020, 9:25pm

Thanks for your feedback. I added this and it has definitely helped.