Data Visualization of Planetary Motion

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  The final engraving!

Inspiration

Aside from a collective fascination with astronomy, we wanted to create an actually accurate representation of the solar system, while still maintaining its natural artistic beauty.

What it does

Takes readily available orbital parameters for the planets in the solar system and derives coordinates for their motion that can be interpreted by a CNC mill. It's a fun and artistic approach to scientific visualization!

How we built it

-Orbital data imported from NASA -Python programming language to calculate polar coordinates of planetary position -Conversion of polar coordinates to cartesian ones -Conversion into G code for CNC machine -CNC engraving into wood

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we wanted to use a paint head to draw the orbits, but we didn't have the materials to create a 4th axis for the pain flow controller.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Due to factors beyond our control, we have a very short time frame for this project (5 hours), so we could not be particularly ambitious with our concept.

We successfully bridged the gap between the virtual and the physical world by taking data processed with python and actually engraving it into a piece of wood!

What we learned

How to work with G-code, most notably.

What's next for Data Visualization of Planetary Motion

We would like to create an interactive version that lets people input their own orbital parameters and play around with different shapes of orbits. We would also like to add compatibility with parabolic and hyperbolic orbits. Finally, we'd like

Built With

• gcode
• python