/codecademy_constellations

Testing Matplotlib data visualization skills with these challenge projects

Primary LanguageJupyter Notebook

codecademy_constellations

Constellations

Overview

This project is slightly different than others you have encountered thus far on Codecademy. Instead of a step-by-step tutorial, this project contains a series of open-ended requirements which describe the project you’ll be building. There are many possible ways to fulfill all of these requirements correctly, and you should expect to use the internet, Codecademy, and other resources when you encounter a problem that you cannot easily solve.

Project Goals

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, a warrior God from ancient Greek mythology.

As a researcher on the Hayden Planetarium team, you are in charge of visualizing the Orion constellation using the Matplotlib function .scatter(). To learn more about the .scatter() you can see the Matplotlib documentation here.

You will create both a 2D and a 3D visualization of the position of 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.

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.

This will be your first reviewable project, which will give you the opportunity to receive some feedback on what you’ve learned so far.