Interactive visualization for American artist James Turrell.
Deep inside Arizona's Painted Desert lies Roden Crater, an extinct volcanic cinder cone. It is the site of a monumental artwork by James Turrell. Over the last 30 years, Turrell, famous for his installations concerning the perception of light, transformed the crater's eye into a naked-eye observatory that will eventually consist of 20 spaces, each constructed to allow the observation of a specific portion of the sky or celestial event. The Interactive Celestial Map I made is part of the artist's website and visualizes the relationship between the sky above Roden Crater and the alignment of the skyspaces he created. The interactive module shows the sky and the arrangement of the sun, the moon, and the stars above Roden Crater at the current time, displayed over a map of the crater. Dragging a circular slider around the visualization allows you to go back and forth in time and observe how the celestial bodies align with the observation spaces in the crater at different points in time. The sun and moon rise and set, stars and planets move across the night sky, and the summer and winter solstices mark the moments where the sun aligns with an opening in a space and projects its image on a precisely positioned surface.
An auto-play button animates the sky in fast-forward while a calendar allows you to see the sky at a specific date in the past or future.
The website was launched together with the opening of James Turrell: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art.