Suggestions On Choice Of Colored Dots

[charles phillipsParticipant]

I am not sure that this is a Showcase, it is more of asking for how to improve the usability of plots. I do use very simple plots (but they do what I need!) to analyze the behavior of various satellites in orbit. I plot a critical angle that is a part of the orbital parameters for satellites.

Here I am plotting a bunch of satellites that come in three series – the French Essaim (translation is swarm) and the Elisa and the Ceres satellites. To summarize – some of these satellites have very few points (they are electronic intelligence satellites who’s parameters are not easily available) and some are just “garden variety” satellites and they are tracked often. My contention is that this angle changes very predictably and a plot will show straight lines as the angle changes. So if you plot various satellites – you can tell them apart. You can make sure that you tagged the satellite correctly.

Often the colors look very similiar, I know that there are values for the Red, Blue, and Green and maybe I should pick the colors better? I avoid using the very pale colors like yellow.

Comments?

Here I contend that if you connect the three green dots you see object 99695, connect the pink dots and that is object 99690. Etc. These plots can appear to almost be a scatter of random dots! I contend that the slope of the line is pretty constant among the various satellites, of course the angle has a range of only 0 – 360 degrees.

You can see (I hope) that SSOT, Pleiades 1, and ASAP-S are tracked often and so have lots of points to plot.

Oddly, the Ceres satellites “precess” the other way.

[charles phillipsParticipant]

In case anyone wants to see the article that these plots are used in:

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4624/1

The article assumes a good knowledge of orbital mechanics among other things.

Here is a similar story using plots, my pal Brad Young generated the plots with Excel.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4634/1

I would contend that DataGraph produces a much better plot!

[riversagencyParticipant]

Test

[charles phillipsParticipant]

It worked.

[Author]

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