A stunning map created by a data-driven illustrator shows all the orbits of over 18,000 asteroids in the Solar System.
If you want to know what a talent for scientific visualisations looks like, check out Eleanor Lutz. She’s a PhD student in biology at the University of Washington, and at her website Tabletop Whale, you can see her amazing work on full display.
It includes 10,000 asteroids that are over 6 miles (10km) in diameter, and about 8,000 objects of unknown size.
Atlas of Space, her latest project focuses on the solar system.
She used publicly available data sets from NASA and the US Geological Survey to create vivid maps of constellations, asteroids, and planets. As the data is stored in several different databases she I had to do strip away a lot of superfluous data.
Part of what drives her is that even though the data is public and freely available, it’s raw. And taking that raw data and turning it into a helpful, and even beautiful, visualisation, takes a lot of work.
In the image, luminescent aquamarine asteroids swirl around the bright, white point of the Sun surrounded by a fuchsia circle.
This orbit map of the Solar System was made by Eleanor Lutz. Check out her work at Tabletop Whale (tabletopwhale.com) Image Copyright: Eleanor Lutz
"One of the most challenging parts of this map was figuring out how to make everything legible. It turns out that things in the solar system are distributed somewhat logarithmically."
"There are exponentially more things closer to the sun, and exponentially more smaller things than big things. So I used a radial logarithmic scale to include large things, far-away things, and tiny, nearby things on the same map. Logarithmic maps aren’t particularly common, but in this case I figured it was OK since no one would use this map for navigation." Lutz states on her web page.
One last fun fact about this map - you might notice that Pluto is shown inside Neptune’s orbit. It turns out that about 10% of the time, Pluto is actually closer to the sun than Neptune. On 12/31/99 Pluto is further away, but it appears closer here because Neptune’s orbit tail reaches back in time to a point when it was closer to the sun. "I actually didn’t know about this before the project, so I spent a long time trying to find the bug in the code before finally realising that the map was working as it should" said Lutz.
'I really like that all this data is accessible, but it's very difficult to visualise,'Ms Lutz told Wired.
'It's really awesome science, and I wanted everyone to be able to see that in a way that makes sense.'
Ms Lutz originally learned Python to help with her lab work, but that didn't quite cover all the complicated techniques she needs to produce these images.
'Because I'm not traditionally trained as a designer, and I'm not really an astronomer, I learned a lot from online tutorials myself,' she said.
'There's a knowledge barrier to accessing some of the interesting, awesome things about science.'
'There are so many facts and equations, and I want those cool ideas to be accessible,' she said.
As the tagline at her website says, she produces 'Charts, infographics, and animations about any and all things science.'
She also has drawn a map of Mars, named 'Here There Be Robots' - a reference to the belief that Medieval map makers would write 'here be dragons' in areas that were unexplored.
It includes an overlay of NASA's topographic imagery along with red circles that indicate landing sites for spacecraft.
Hand drawn map of Mars, created by the Seattle-based science illustrator. It shows some of the red planet's most famous features and includes an overlay of NASA's topographic imagery along with red circles that indicate landing sites for spacecraft
Her latest works, published on her blog this month, are cutaway diagrams showing the interior layers of each of the rocky planets.
In the diagram above, the left half shows the actual thickness of each layer, and the right half shows a version where each layer has a minimum thickness, because the layers on some planets were so thin that they were virtually invisible. For Mercury and the Moon there’s actually no difference, but the effect is much stronger for the other planets with a very thin crust or atmosphere.
Visit her website, Tabletop Whale, where you can explore her work and her methods. You can also purchase prints there.