Exoplanets on Visual Cinnamon

The Radius Gap

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Scientific American commissioned me to create a data visualization for an article exploring the “radius gap.” This is a puzzling absence of exoplanets within a specific size range, larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. The goal was to illustrate this phenomenon in a way that was both scientifically accurate and visually compelling. Rather than relying on a traditional scatterplot, I aimed to design something more engaging while still making the data accessible to readers. The final visualization, inspired by sci-fi aesthetics, uses a polar plot with density contour lines to highlight the two distinct populations of exoplanets: Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes. This approach not only made the radius gap apparent but also provided a striking, intuitive way to compare these distant worlds to our own solar system.

The Essence of Us

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“The Essence of Us” is a subtly moving data art piece that asks the question “What defines Human Culture?” through the lens of the 5000+ exoplanets that have been discovered since the first in 1992. Data about the exoplanets is mapped to every visual aspect that you see. Earth, Us, is symbolically placed us in the center, and every spiral around it is one exoplanet. My intent was to create a slowly moving piece that you can stare into and wonder about that initial question, what defines human culture as a whole? This piece is still available for sale

Meet the neighbors

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This visual shows all the stars that we’ve discovered within 20 light years from our Solar system, and the exoplanets belonging to 12 of those stars. When comparing the types of stars, it becomes clear that most are found around M-type stars. That is why projects such as NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has a prioritized list of similar type stars to look for even more exoplanets. The visual appeared in the 2017 December issue of the Scientific American.

Visualizing the “Beauty of Math” in 3 minutes

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A very short blog where you can find the slides and video of the 3-minute elevator pitch I gave at the Reasons to conference in Brighton, UK on Wednesday September 7th 2016. And as a bonus some images of things that didn’t make it!

Data-based and unique gradients for visualizations with d3.js

Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the past few weeks, several tutorials about SVG gradients in data visualizations have come to pass already. But those were mostly focusing on creating one gradient. In this tutorial, I want to show you how you can create a gradient for each of your datapoints. And how to adjust each of these gradients using some aspect of your data, so each gradient will become unique.

Creating an interactive “exoplanets in orbit” visualization

Wed, 24 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Having enjoyed the process of explaining a visualization through Storytelling in my previous post about chord diagrams, I wanted to create another and try a slightly different approach. And give myself a new project to learn more about d3.js and JavaScript in general.