I was interested in visualising scientific data in a way that could be used for day-to-day purposes. While space exploration and astronomy can be intimidating subjects, observing the night sky is a great place to start and understanding what can be observed with the naked eye is a great place to start. I decided to make a visual representation of the brightest stars in the sky, highlighting the best times in the year to see them and their appearance. I decided to include the colours of the stars, since they were significantly different from each other and to highlight their distance from the earth, to add to the element of awe when viewing these stars. Other attributes I considered including constellations, relative size and temperature but I felt like they did not contribute significantly to the purpose of viewing the stars and may add clutter to an otherwise simple visual story. I narrowed the list down to 21 stars based on the information I could find.
Process
My main source of information was Fred Schaaf’s The Brightest Stars: Discovering the Universe through the Sky's Most Brilliant Stars. Schaaf delved into details on each of the stars themselves and their historical significance, which was one of the major factors in the narrowing down of my final list to the top 21 stars. Once I had created my dataset, I experimented with its organisation to find the best way to visualise it. While the list itself was based on apparent magnitude/brightness, I felt that organising it by viewing seasons would make it an interesting visual to refer to throughout the year.
The visual language was partly inspired by Nadieh Bremer’s Magic is Everywhere from her book with Shirley Wu titled Data Sketches. I enjoyed the fluidity and magical atmosphere of the gradient mesh and thought it would be an interesting way to present the seasons as a backdrop, considering the viewing times varied between early and late periods of each season. The networks made the data appear like constellations as well, which I really liked but given the limited time to complete the project and my inexperience working with network visualisations, I decided not to incorporate constellations into my story. I also couldn't find a way to incorporate each and every constellation (that the brightest stars are in) into my story in a seamless manner so I decided to exclude it rather than clutter my visual.
