The scientist/artists in NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio created this magnificent video to accompany a recent performance by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops of Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune." From NASA:

The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches...

The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018.

The Colors of Motion creates abstract images by sampling the distinctive colors of frames and then stacking them as individual horizontal lines. This gives an impression of the movie's overall sense of color--and an idea of its narrative progression.

Pictured above is Blade Runner 2049. Here's 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Here's Disney's Aladdin:

Here's Aliens:

And Fantastic Mr. Fox:

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Nadieh Breme's Royal Constellations is a delightful starry visualization of a millenium of familial connections between European royals, and it gets right down to business: "Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique."

Pick any two and it draws a line between them, revealing ancestral lines going back to the beginning—from the kings of medieval Wales all the way to the Windsors. Read the rest

Ventusky depicts gorgeous animated maps showing where the wind blows—and how fast it's blowing. Pictured above is Hurricane Matthew making landfall on Friday. Read the rest

The online enyclopedia is "reimagined as a cosmic web of knowledge" at Wikiverse: a representational web upon the literal web that implemented a conceptual web. Read the rest

Check out A Year In The Life of Earth's CO₂, a visualization of greenhouse gases swirling in the atmosphere. A voice-over explains what you're seeing as the months roll by, such as summer carbon monoxide blooms in the southern hemisphere. Tip: change the projection by dragging the map. Read the rest

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

This video lets you hitch a ride on a photon emitted from the sun. It takes about 45 minutes to get to Jupiter.

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Be sure to view the LA Times' interactive graphic, where you can see stats, details of each shot (the longest to sink was from 43ft), and the full court. Folks keep asking why there's a "dead zone." The answer is surely the obvious one: that it's just inside the 3-point line. When you're that close to it, you may as well go for 3 points rather than take another step and only get 2. Read the rest

Inspired by the "evolutionary tree diagram" format, Talking Heads vocalist, artist, and writer David Byrne drew numerous tree diagrams meant to "explain" everyday phenomena, terminology, and the irrationality of life. For example, above is the diagram of "Romantic Destiny" (2003). Ten years ago, Byrne collected his diagrams in a wonderful book titled Arboretum.

Möbius Structure of Relationships:

Legacy of Good Habits:

History of Mark-Making:

See more on Byrne's site: "Tree Drawings/Arboretum"

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Polygraph and Billboard's HOT RAP SONGS" CHART (1989 - 2015) is a perfect visualization (and audiolization) of how music drifts in and out of the public consciousness, using a generation-worth of rap hits as the raw material. Read the rest

At the dawn of the 19th century, naturalist Alexander von Humboldt invented the "thematic map," pioneering infographics through the likes of maps annotated with zoological life, temperature, elevations, and other data meant to present an area's "physical phenomena into one image," according to this profile on Atlas Obscura.

Above, "a plate from Atlas of Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos, illustrating the composition of the Earth's crust via color-coding."

Below, "a snowflake of clocks illustrates world time zones, with Dresden at the center. "

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Chris Walker created a fascinating interactive graphic of migration patterns within the United States. It's based on US Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey estimates. Here are a few insights that Walker gleaned: Read the rest

If you're the type of person who really needs some good visuals to make a concept stick in your head, this series of YouTube videos made by the British Psychological Society Media Centre will help you remember the meanings behind statistical concepts like "correlation", "frequency distributions", and "sampling error". There are four videos in the series so far, and they do a great job of painting pictures around abstract ideas. Bonus: Soothing music.

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Big Data meets Bigfoot in Penn State PhD candidate Joshua Stevens's visualization of nearly a century of Sasquatch sighting reports in the US and Canada. Stevens mapped and graphed more than 3,000 sightings included in the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organizations's database of geocoded and timestamped reports. Stevens writes:

Right away you can see that sightings are not evenly distributed. At first glance, it looks a lot like a map of population distribution. After all, you would expect sightings to be the most frequent in areas where there are a lot of people. But a bivariate view of the data shows a very different story. There are distinct regions where sightings are incredibly common, despite a very sparse population. On the other hand, in some of the most densely populated areas sasquatch sightings are exceedingly rare.

"‘Squatch Watch: 92 Years of Bigfoot Sightings in the US and Canada" (Thanks, everyone!) Read the rest