NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Stephen Wawrzyniec
Date: 2016 Jul 8, 12:07 -0600
Stephen,
You asked:
What program?
I used two programs, actually. I couldn't believe how difficult it was to find an application to do this seemingly simple task. A Google search returned a list of programs, but few were free or even reasonably priced. One cost more than US$600!! Finally, I found a free sample Excel spreadsheet called "Excel3DScatterPlot" which uses macros to accomplish what Excel cannot do natively. It allows you to paste your data in and customize how it's displayed. It's a bit tricky to use, but quite clever. (Well beyond my ability, anyway.)
To animate the plot, I used Adobe PhotoShop CS3 to make a .gif out of multiple screenshots of the plot in the various perspectives. A laborious task, to be sure. But, I suppose any program capable of making .gifs would be up to the task. Some may be better suited than others. PhotoShop is just what I am accustomed to using.
Cheers!
Sean C.
