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The Scroll Art Museum

Orbital Travels

Al Sweigart, 2024. A collection of random points moving in sine waves.

Several of Al Sweigart's attempts to make scroll art are built from complex ideas and complicated code that produce mediocre results. Orbital Travels was an absurdly simple idea that turned into one of his favorite pieces of scroll art: showing multiple characters moving back and forth in sine waves at different rates. Using different characters for each wave (one of @ O 0 o * . , v V) gives the final output a nice texture. The results delighted Sweigart and reminded him of an orbiting moon following the Earth. With a fixed Earth, the moon's orbit looks circular. But when the movement of the Earth is followed, the Moon can be seen moving in a helix path. Sweigart therefore named the piece Orbital Travels.

You can configure the characters used in the sine waves by adjsuting the ALL_CHARS constant.

Python source code

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