Exoplanets

[spm2164]

I want to do a graphic showing all of the exoplanets discovered to date! An exoplanet is a planet that exists outside of our own solar system, and these days we know about hundreds of them. I want to make a graphic you can mouse over to highlight groups of planets that are similar in various ways, eg. earth-like or jupiter-like or even super-mega planets. Then, if you click on a planet, that planet and the rest of the planets in its system along with its star will snap together to form a solar system, with stats and everything! I drew inspiration from this: And actually from this: Theories of Everything, Mapped from one of our Friday sessions. My main dataset would be the NASA exoplanet archive, but I would probably also need various other things from the Kepler stellar archive to make sense of the scales and colors of things.

Also I will need to know js, so I might have to table this for another week and come up with a new pitch for this week. But this is what I was thinking about already.

[djlee0202]

Awesome idea! One of the most challenging part of your work will be the "defining and ranking similarity factors of planets." Maybe adding the dictionary separately which explains how you ordered them will be helpful for the viewer.

[spm2164]

I really want to do this as an interactive, so I'm going to table it until we know js.

[playfairbot]

Hi there, I'm the Playfair Bot!

Would you mind posting the appropriate checklist in the main body of your issue? You might have posted it as the first comment, but it turns out it works way better in the actual body of the issue - just go up to the veeery top right and click the pencil icon to edit. You'll probably want to edit the comment to copy the checklist, then edit the original issue to paste it in.

Thanks! :pray:

[barjacks]

Hey @spm2164 great idea. And nice layout you have drawn up. Why does is have to be interactive though? I would actually much rather see this as a graph where you have done all the grouping and offer the reader some annotations of why certain planets stand out, what's special about other ones, the biggest, the smallest, where earth is, etc. etc. That way it would also work on my mobile phone. :-)

[spm2164]

So I decided to switch back to this, considering a decent amount of input (not just @barjacks) indicating that this doesn't have to be an interactive. Here's a first effort, with all planets to scale, with the sun in yellow and jupiter in red:

I couldn't figure out a better way to get them all on there so currently the placement is 100% random. This will improve soon. Oh, also earth is on there too but its so tiny you can't see it. I clearly have scale issues.

Also, yes, that one planet is really freaking big.

[barjacks]

I really like it. Putting them into groups - rocky planets, Earth like planets, gas planets. But I also just like the way you've randomly plotted these planets on the map. So I think I'd also work with this forth map as well, making sure you let the reader know exactly that it's all in random order, and highlighting maybe 4-5 planets with annotations, including Earth of course.

[thisss]

Looks great. You should put it on the wall! ;-) Or label it and group things. That would give you some more informative charts.

[palrogg]

Looks great, like drip painting! Two suggestions:

• use the estimated temperature for a red-blue color scale?
• add some opacity (except for Jupyter and the sun)
• maybe a logarithmic scale could work for one of the axis