For two years I’ve been working on a collection
of ten maps of planets, moons, and outer space.
To name a few, I’ve made an animated map of the
seasons on Earth, a map of Mars geology, and a
map of everything in the solar system bigger than
10km. I call it my Atlas of Space.
Last summer I began sharing each map, along
with the open-source Python code and detailed
tutorials for re-creating the design. All of the
astronomy data comes from publicly available
sources like NASA, USGS, and the International
Astronomical Union (IAU), so I thought this would
be the perfect project for writing design tutorials
(which I’ve been meaning to do for a while).
THE FINISHED TUTORIALS NOW COVER:
• Working with Digital Elevation Models (DEMs)
in Bash and Python
• Working with ESRI shapefiles in Python
• Using the NASA HORIZONS orbital mechanics
server and scraping internet data
• Working with NASA image data
• Combining many datasets into one map
• Color palettes and style design
• Decorative illustrations and painting in
Photoshop
• Plotting with symbols and different languages
in Matplotlib
• Editing Python outputs in Illustrator
• Using the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary
Nomenclature
• Map projections in Python Cartopy
• Mapping constellations using star catalog data.
I originally learned Python for my grad school
research, which involved processing video
recordings of mosquito behavior. I really liked
the language, and now I use Python extensively
for data management and graphic design. I also
love teaching Python — I volunteer for Software
Carpentry (software-carpentry.org), and I taught
Data Science for Biologists at UW last year with
Bing Brunton and Kam Harris (github.com/
eleanorlutz/Data_science_for_biologists_2019).
So if you’re interested in beginner-friendly
explanations of Python cartography, web
scraping, or using the NASA orbital mechanics
server, this is the project for you.
Software used includes Python 3.7.1, GDAL
TIME REQUIRED:
A Weekend
DIFFICULTY:
Intermediate
COST:
$0
TOOLS
» Computer running Python 3.7.1 and GDAL 2.4.1,
both free and open source
» Image editing software, raster and vector I
used Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 and Illustrator
CC 2019, but you can also use the free open
source programs Gimp and Inkscape.
2.4.1, NASA HORIZONS, Adobe Illustrator
and Photoshop. Python dependencies include
matplotlib, numpy, pandas, os, cartopy, json,
osgeo, math, scipy, and jupyter.
Each of the following tutorials includes
special instructions for beginners, graphic
design advice, and all of my open source code,
ready to run. Find them at at github.com/
eleanorlutz?tab=repositories. You can do this.
SOLAR SYSTEM ORBITAL MAP
This tutorial shows how to map the orbits of all
the planets and more than 18,000 asteroids. This
includes everything we know of that’s over 10km
in diameter — about 10,000 asteroids — plus
8,000 randomized ’roids of unknown size. I used
the NASA JPL Small-Body Database Search
Engine to make a list of all known asteroids
and comets in the solar system, and pulled the
planets, moons, and trans-Neptunian objects
from other NASA datasets. All this data is public
but it’s in several different databases so I had to
do a decent amount of data cleaning. The map
shows each asteroid at its exact position on New
Year’s Eve 1999.
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makeprojects.com
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