What's in Your Night-time Sky?

Purpose

To create an infographic of all 88 IUA constellations, and to include the dark-cloud constellations too

The plan is to have several parameters:

  • A -180 to +180 slider set to 0 to represent the compass, switch the degrees to names

  • A month selector, this shall instead lighten/darken constellations that a viewable on a clear night from your locations

  • Northern/Southern hemisphere switch

  • The ability to switch between constellation or dark-cloud - this will probably be a window switch as the constellations shall be painted on an inky-blue background, where the dark-cloud formations might be better represented on a light background

The dashboard might benefit from an altered Datawonders logo set painted in grey hues to sit on a dark background

Layout / Wireframe

The plan is to draw each constellation side-by side on a horizontal plane, that moves in line with the compass slider something similar to Skyrim’s character build screen. Users must be able to select a constellation to learn more:

A large scope box beneath the main constellation belt will re-compose to the selected constellation.
It will be great to make use of Tableau’s animation function here to re-arrange the points on selection

Two more panels are to be included:

  • One beneath the central scope to provide a description of the constellation, possibly including an image of exactly what constellation represents

  • A slide-in section to the right on a show/hide button to provide quick-data such as discovery date, discoverer, antiquity etc

Project Title

What’s in Your Night-Time Sky?

Working Title

None

Font

Headings: Georgia
Body: Garamond
Chart text: Arial

Type (Report / App)

Single-page dashboard

Audience

Any interested party

Publish Location

Publicly Accessible (Tableau Public)

Data Compression Level (Grain)

None

Purpose

Infographic for the recognised constellations and dark-cloud formation

Data Source(s)

Manually produced

Data refresh times

None: One-off report

Data Connection

Embedded

Interactivity

Fully interactive

Project Status

Planning

Project Start Date

 

Project Delivery Date

 

In Scope:

Section

Tasks

Section

Tasks

Page 1: Constellations

Page 2: (secret) Dark-cloud

Introduction and explanations
All constellations drawn and joined by their point, the data will need a path descriptor to enable Tableau to draw then line, and a group identifier to prevent Tableau from attempting to join the constellations
Central scope, need to work-out how to animate points as they change for each constellation selection (this has been done before see Titanic - a Great loss of life by Simon Rowe)
The lower description box
The slide-in info panel
Redesign the Datawonders logos to sit on a dark screen: the current logo being formed of primary colours might look just as great
Compass slider parameter
Calendar month selector - be nice to use a grid
Dashboard background to be inky-blue
Ensure row and column separators are selected to help separate the constellations
The month selector isn’t a filter: it colours the constellations from dark-grey to light-grey based on their known luminosity for the time of year
Dashboard selector: discretely switches between the constellations and dark-cloud formations