Kepler Binary Clock

Here's a fun animation I created, artistically visualizing over 1,300 eclipsing binary stars from Kepler.

 
Binary Clock from James Davenport (or see it on Visually)

Each "hand" represents a binary pair, and each concentric ring groups the binaries by their orbital period. In the center are hundreds of binary systems with orbits shorter than a day (the shortest is just 6 hours!) At the speed of the video, these orbits are a blur. The outer-most hand tracks a binary star system with an orbital period of about 120 days. This is considered quite a long period binary, even though it's 3 times shorter than an Earth year!

Here are some extra details:

• Period data from v1.96 of the Kepler Binary Catalog.
• Animation is 1500 postscript frames, 
• converted to png with ImageMagick, 
• animation made with ffmpeg.
• Music: As Colorful As Ever by Broke For Free