Video Visualization of Kepler Exoplanet Data

By Nancy Atkinson - February 10, 2011 at 10:14 AM UTC | Exoplanets

This is really nifty: a visualization of the 1,235 exoplanet candidates observed by Kepler in the

recently released data,

created by Jer Thorp. In the video, all the candidates are shown as if orbiting a single star – just for the purposes of comparisons. The size of the colored dot is proportional to the size of the planet, and two of the most promising candidates for habitability are highlighted (KOI 326.01 and KOI 314.02).

You can see more visualizations on

Boing Boing

Jer Thorp's Vimeo site

, and

Ian Musgrave on Astroblog

has some other links to visualizations and other things done with the Kepler data.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com