Plot Earth in a Scatter3d plot for orbits

📊 Plotly Python
1

Hi everybody,

I know that I’m not the first one looking for a way to plot Earth in a 3D plot in order to plot satellite orbits around Earth, but I did not succeded to find a viable solution for that.

  1. For the moment I only succeded to perform my orbits with go.Scatter3d objects and to perform the Earth with a blue Sphere with transparency :

    Capture
    Capture756×555 55.2 KB

  2. Now I’d like to plot with any solution the surface of Earth (Continents & Oceans).
    The solution using a Maps projection is realy beatiful but not appropriated because it don’t allows to perform 3D plots, only ground projections (so it could be nice for groundtracks but not really what I’m looking for :

    image
    image1164×495 37 KB

Finally, I’m trying to provide a texture to my Sphere form planet textures maps but this solution needs to provide a set of colors bewteen 0 and 1 (surfacecolor and colorscale). It implies that it’s not really possible to use this king of texture:

earthmap1k
earthmap1k1000×500 335 KB

  1. Finally,
    I’m trying to use a black and white texture map but I have some difficulties with the way to initialize the surfacecolor:

earthspec1k
earthspec1k1000×500 101 KB

Is someone have already found a viable solution to have a nice earth in a 3D plot please ?
Or maybe can try to help my to configure the surfacecolor for the black and white representation ?

Thank you in advance !!!

1 Like
2

Hi @adelalla,

You cannot add texture to the sphere, but you can define some scalar field on it, and map its values to a colorscale, like in this notebook: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~empet/14813/heatmap-plot-on-a-spherical-map/#1
The notebook was edited more than two years ago, but I think its code is still working (the code follows old plotly style, using dictionaries).

To the figure containing the Earth (sphere) you can add another Scatter3d traces for orbits.