* The Solar System in 5 Lines of Python
** Category: Education
** Audience level: Novice
** Duration: 30 minutes
** Outline

Only a few lines of a powerful language like Python
are necessary to start enjoying a tour of the universe.
And by bringing friends or students along for the ride,
you can intrigue them with the first rudiments of programming.
Using the popular Matplotlib library and the PyEphem astronomy package,
this talk will teach you to visualize spatial data
using Python's industry-leading tools!

** Abstract

We often use abstract data
when we teach graphing and visualization —
we ask students to plot the daily traffic to a web site,
or the fluctuating value of a stock index.
But since manipulating and displaying data
are proving to be important Python superpowers
that result in real-world Python adoption,
we should explore many more ways
of teaching people to experiment with programming
and learn new ways to think and see.

This talk will take us on a beginner's tour
of Python and Matplotlib through the use of a very concrete concept:
we will ask the computer to draw our home — the Earth —
and its place in the Solar System and Universe.

Each sample program will be short.
In fact, each program will fit legibly on a single slide.
But, over the course of the talk,
they will gradually introduce programming concepts
until we have assembled a good idea of how solutions
get put together in Python.
Our focus will be on using general-purpose Python constructs
as glue between a data source — the astronomy library —
and the Matplotlib plot that is going to display it.
While many specific features of both PyEphem and Matplotlib
will necessarily be involved,
the talk will avoid getting sidetracked
into a laundry-list examination of library APIs,
and instead invite listeners to go check out
the library documentation later.

Meanwhile, the talk will be taking us on a tour of the Universe,
using 2D and 3D plots to help us picture
something that very few people can visualize accurately on their own:
the way that our planet is situated within space.
We will start with its basic motion,
then step further back to see the dance of the Solar System,
and finally step very far back
to learn our position within our galaxy —
all of which are results
that you can immediately carry into the back yard
and use to explain what you see in the sky!

At each step we will construct a pair of plots,
one showing the real position of objects in space,
and the other showing the apparent motion
that results in the Earth's sky —
and in the process we will learn about the seasons, about eclipses,
about why the ancient Greek Ptolemy
had to invent all of those epicycles
to explain the motion of the planets across the sky,
and why Copernicus needed epicycles
even after he put the sun in the right place.

To empower every member of the audience
to take these examples to their friends and community,
and so the audience can themselves experiment
with these ideas later,
the code samples will all be MIT-licensed
and available in a repository on GitHub.

** Additional notes

Allow me to assure the committee that this talk will be entirely
preprepared — the code samples carefully pre-formatted in a big visible
font at the top of my slides, and the resulting plots rendered as
foolproof PNG files. There will be no dangerous live coding, editing, or
demonstrations involved! Also, it would easily be possible to expand
this to a 45-minute slot by including more material, which would allow a
few more Matplotlib features to fit within the talk; but the talk will
be quite reasonable and complete at 30 minutes, so that is what I have
selected as the default.