As of 01/29/2017, there have been 3442 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) found outside of our solar system. Inspired by this post on Space.com, I wanted to try my hand at a different visualization of that data. The full pdf can be viewed here.

This shows the exoplanets that have been found on a right ascension / declination plot - so as you would see it in the night sky if you could actually see these. The colors give an indication of how hot their parent star is, and the size of the circle gives a relative size of the parent star.

Python

The IPython/Jupyter notebook can be viewed on the nbviewer site, and the notebook can be downloaded from my GitHub page.

Some Notes

Because of the range of stellar sizes, there is a lower limit to the size of the stars represented here. The stellar colors are generated from the PyAstronomy package, based on the stellar temperature using the model from Ballesteros via the pyasl.BallesterosBV_T function.

The clusterings are not where more exoplanets are in the night sky, but rather just where astronomers have found them. A staggering amount of exoplanets have been found by NASA’s Kepler space telescope (2,325 as of 2016). This telescope looks continuously at a patch of sky to see brightness variations for transiting planets (see these two NASA pages).