Data Visualization with Python

Scatter plots with Matplotlib 

I'm in the middle of taking a 6 week Data Visualization course at Code Academy so I guess you might call this a midterm project. In this jupyter notebook project, we have use real world space data (celestial star location ) for the Orion constellation and output a 3D scatter plot. This was fun but because it is an intro course, the project didn't even get to labeling the actual star which I thought was bunk. 

At the end of the project, they offer you a link to some star data and challenge you to plot some local stars. So I decided to publish my results that I will end up turning in for the extra credit portion of the project. (code below)

I picked a few stars, starting with some familiar ones, like Sirius, and started plotting it out. It took a while to get the labels on correctly, for some reason, I thought it was going to be easy but it definitely took some searching as the 3D portion of it made finding the examples far more challenging than the standard 2D graphs.  The output was cool.

However, the coolest thing about a 3D chart is being able to to turn and view it from any angle. I created an animation after another hour or so which was excellent. The final part and by far the most difficult was exporting the animation as a gif/video. That part I did outside of code and just used some other software. The matplotlib needs some help with that since it requires a third party software such as ImageMagik or FFMPEG. 

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from matplotlib import pyplot as plt from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D import matplotlib.animation as animation # star data from http://www.stellar-database.com using Celestial (X,Y,Z) coordinates new_star_legend = ['Procyon', 'Sirius', '61 Cygni','Alpha/Proxima Centari', 'Wolf 359'] a = [ -4.769, -1.612, 6.489, -1.643 , -0.0566 ] b = [10.31, 8.078, -6.109, -1.374, -5.920] c = [1.039, -2.474, 7.152, -3.838, 0.486] # create the figure and subplot axes fig = plt.figure() ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1,projection='3d') ax.set_title('Celestial (X,Y,Z) coordinates in ly') # scatter plot ax.scatter(a, b, c, marker='*', linewidth=4) # apply labels to each star for zdir, x, y, z in zip(new_star_legend, a, b, c): ax.text(x, y, z, zdir) # apply a simple rotation animation for angle in range(0, 360): ax.view_init(30, angle) plt.draw() plt.pause(.001) # the show method is not needed in this instance # plt.show()

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