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.
Lookin’ good.
Just a quick question, is the orbit in real time?
I doubt that’s in real time but that was definitely a very cool visualization.