January 23rd, 2008Orrery, Good Even with the R’s
I don’t like words with a lot of r’s. Thanks to school-provided speech therapy, “horror” is manageable, but I still avoid “rural” at all costs, preferring “country” or even “backwoods” when in a bind.
Everything is relative. I am proud that I can say “orrery”, while Arkansas-based Eugene Sargent makes them by hand. I’ve had a thing for these temporal maps or (spatial timepieces) ever since I saw Aughra’s in The Dark Crystal. You might also remember the side quest to rebuild the orrery in Oblivion’s Arcane University (though it’s DLC unless you have a later version of the game) or that Ozymandias of Watchmen fame had one.
Some commenters at the Boing Boing post where I found this wondered why there are only six planets. There’s no “about” page, but I assume he’s following the tradition of only showing the six planets visible to the naked eye from Earth (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).
Every time I see something like this, I want to move somewhere with a garage.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Originally, I had planned on going out to neptune on the planets, but when I got out as far as Saturn, I realized that Neptune and Uranus would take another 2 reductions each, and they would move so slowly as to be boring. Also, the arms were getting pretty long as it was, and I didn’t want to bunch the planets any closer.