exoplanet explorer

I wanted to have some fun with data viz and d3, which required me to acquire a dataset big enough to make the fun hard. The nasa exoplanet archive has six thousand planets in it, and honestly quite messy to pull sometimes, so that was that.

Hover a dot and its siblings light up with it. Filter by how each planet was found, or drag across the timeline and watch the discovery eras come and go.

I didn’t want to use chart libraries (which admittedly, would’ve made this much easier – but isn’t that the whole point?) The dots are ordinary svg circles so every planet stays inspectable in the dom, and hover doesn’t need six thousand tiny hit targets: one listener and a delaunay triangulation find the nearest planet to the pointer.