Animated Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram with 119,614 datapoints

About

Got bored with a lot of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams out there, so I made and animated my own using 119,614 data points in a star catalog.

Stars twinkle for two reasons:

• Aesthetics
• Reduces overploting

Graphic

Notes:

If you're going to play with this:

• Make sure you have FFMPEG installed
• the last line is optimized to work with unix-like systems (Linux/Mac, basically). If you have Windows, replace it with DEL star_anim*.png
• make sure the second line has the correct working directory under setwd().

Sources:

• The HYG database

More info on H-R Diagrams from Wikipedia

Tools used:

• ggplot2
• Rstudio

Other Information:

Reddit thread

I'm told that this star catalog may potentially contain inaccurate information. See comments here.