Connecting the Stars - A Journey to Tech

Kim Fitter

About me

Project Manager and Test Manager in previous life

Self taught in R and worked as a Data Scientist

Enspiral Dev Academy

Full Stack Engineer in the Xero Ecosystem (Sept 2020 - Mar 2022)

Data Platform Engineer in the Xero Data Team (Mar 2022+)

Community meetup organiser

About this talk

Disclaimer: This talk is about a data visualisation personal project, not related to work at Xero

This story started in New Zealand


Draggable globe made with D3.js in Observable (by Kim Fitter)

A trip to St John's Observatory in January 2019

dark star reserve

I then used open source data to write a blog and create a map of

10 brightest stars

Map made in R using D3-Celestial data (by Kim Fitter)

The blog post was also repurposed by someone else

In 2021 I returned to the D3-Celestial dataset with other tools

D3.js - Data Driven Documents

Vega-Lite.js - A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

Visualising the apparent magnitude property using D3.js

Sparkly map in D3.js using D3-Celestial data (by Kim Fitter)

Analysing the magnitude using Vega-Lite.js

Magnitude dot plot

The dimmer the star, the higher the apparent magnitude (m) number

The brightest star, Sirius has m = -1.44

Which is almost 2 magnitudes brighter than Vega (m = 0)

Where 1m: brightness factor of 2.512

Analysing the color using Vega-Lite.js

B-V color index dot plot

Hot stars (low B-V) are blue/purple and cool stars (high B-V) are red

Where B-V is difference in blue (B) and visual (V) filters

What have I learnt from visualising star data?

Be curious about data when learning code

Try new tools, but don't hold on too tight

.....challenge your assumptions about the data

.....analyse your data

.....define the meta data

Connect with others and share your knowledge

Question

How could you use data to build your products and applications?

How I made these slides

Select JS libraries for slides based on a blog post - reveal.js + vite.js

Customise CSS based on a Twitter post

References

How to set up local HTML presentations using Reveal.js engine bundled by Vite.js

Celestial Maps blog - Kim Fitter

Introduction to Vega-Lite

What is stellar magnitude?

Observable JavaScript data analysis and maps - Kim Fitter

Thanks

https://connected-stars.netlify.app/


@Kim_Fitter