Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Listening To Orion

This is a new and strange form of data analysis, so I'm starting simple and "looking" at some pretty basic stuff.

The constellation of Orion is rising in the early evenings this time of year, so I thought it appropriate to focus on what can be heard when using some data about the seven brightest stars of Orion: Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Mintaka, Alnilam, Alnitak, and Saiph.

What do the angular distances between Betelgeuse and the other six stars sound like?  I calculated these distances and translated them into audio frequencies.  The shorter the distance, the lower the frequency.  And this is what I got:

Orion Angular Distances

I then took the physical distances (in light years) between us and each of these stars, and did the same thing.  Again, the shorter the distance, the lower the frequency:

Orion Physical Distances

Finally, I took the visual magnitudes of these seven stars and translated them into audio frequencies.  In this case, the brighter the star (smaller magnitude), the higher the frequency.  To get this:

Orion Magnitudes

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