I’m excited to finally share a new design project this week! Over the past year and a half I’ve been working on a collection of ten maps on planets, moons, and outer space. To name a few, I’ve made an animated map of the seasons on Earth, a map of Mars geology, and a map of everything in the solar system bigger than 10km.

Over the next few weeks I want to share each map alongside the open-source Python code and detailed tutorials for recreating the design. All of the astronomy data comes from publicly available sources like NASA and the USGS, so I thought this would be the perfect project for writing design tutorials (which I’ve been meaning to do for a while).

I originally learned Python for my grad school research, which involved processing video recordings of mosquito behavior. I really liked the language, and in the past few years I’ve been using Python extensively for data management and design. I also love teaching Python (I volunteer for Software Carpentry, and I taught Data Science for Biologists at UW last year with Bing Brunton and Kam Harris). So if you’re interested in beginner-friendly explanations of Python cartography, web scraping, or using the NASA orbital mechanics server, check back here next week for the first map tutorial! Up next week - A map of everything in the solar system bigger than 10km.