LO-2-Generative Art

Upon looking through Robert Hodgin’s portfolio, a project that caught my attention was “Star Chart.” This project was completed in April 2020 and is essentially a map of constellations from any time and location. As a statistics major, I study a lot about data so the fact that this project was achieved through the use of astronomical databases piqued my interest. I admire how he was able to take something rather unexciting and imperceptible like a database of numbers and made it into something much more visual and stimulating. This project was a continuation from a previous project of his from 2012 where he plotted about 120,000 different star positions in a 3-D space to mimic the stars surrounding the sun. For this new project, however, he wanted to show the night sky view of the stars so he used stereographic projection, which projects a sphere onto a plane.
Hodgin’s interest in physics and astronomy requires accuracy and precision, which suit perfectly with his methods of using data visualization to create his projects.