An Out of this World Accident by Mississippi State University

I am an astronomer working on a website to deliver stellar properties to the masses. While I was making a JS version of what we call an Hertzspring-Russell diagram, a plot of stars comparing their temperature (horizontal axis) to their brightness (vertical axis), I made the submitted image. It can be tricky to place the white dwarfs like Sirius B and blue giant stars like Vega on the same plot. In this case, I was messing with realistically scaling the diameters of the stars. This plot is showing all the stars and brown dwarfs we know exist within about 30 light years from the Sun with relatively realistic scaling for their radii but way too big to be displayed in a dynamic plot. The letters at the bottom represent the spectral types of the stars with O stars being the hottest and M stars being the coolest. The LTY letters correspond to brown dwarfs which lie between stars and giant planets like Jupiter on this type of plot. The relative location of the stars on the plot is accurate despite the stellar radii being too large. While this image is not what I wanted to be displayed on my web application called the Starchive, it is a striking way to display these stars so I thought I’d submit it for this contest.