rave-dr6-3d-animation

What problem does it solve?

Quickly visualizes and communicates the structure of the nearest stars by automatically querying the RAVE DR6 catalog, converting results into coordinate representations, and producing both publication-ready 2D plots and a 3D rotating animation.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Data retrieval: Query the RAVE DR6 TAP service to obtain the 100 closest stars by parallax and load results into a structured table.
• Coordinate transformations: Compute RA/Dec, Galactic coordinates, and 3D unit-sphere vectors for visualization.
• Visualization output: Generate high-quality 2D plots (RA/Dec and Galactic projections) and a 3D rotating MP4 animation suitable for talks.
• Reproducibility: Scripted workflow uses standard Python tools to reproduce results on a typical Linux environment.

Quick Start

Run the workflow to query the RAVE DR6 TAP service, convert results to a DataFrame, generate 2D plots, and render a 3D rotating animation of the nearest stars.