Recently a friend of mine was explaining a game called Space 1889 to me. It’s based on the works of Jules Verne and the like from the Victorian era.
One of the pieces of equipment they used for navigating the stars was an orrery. An orrery for those who do not know is a scale model of the solar system. It’s usually mechanical or driven by an electric motor.
I’m a collector of unusual mechanical devices and would love to have one of these. Searches on Google have yeilded little results. Most end with links to planatariums and such where they have huge models. I’m looking for somthing I could use as a focal point in my foyer. Somthing around 2" to 3" in diameter and fully mechanical. I’d love to have all of the planets represented and their moons. I’d really love to have the entire solar system including the moons fully articulated.
This brass orrery looks nice. (On my browser you have to scroll through a lot of white to get to the pictures) There’s also a brit/scott artistan that makes orreries out of metal and semiprecious stones. Can’t seem to find his website today though.
No, I’ve seen all of those. I’m looking for somthing bigger. The brass one is kinda what I’m looking for, but I want all of the moons in the solar system to move in proper time. And an all mechanical version would be prefered.
That what I was going for. I’m planning construction of a new home and plan on adding an observitory to it in the form of a turrent on one corner of the house. It would be interesting to have this piece at the bottom of the “tower” if you will. The tower itself will have a spiral staircase going up 3 stories to the observitory itself. Needless to say, this is being built quite aways away from the city. I expect my commute to be over an hour long when I’m done with it.
Did I read that right, that you want a two or three inch orrery, with all the planets and moons? I would say that’s impossible. It would take nanofabrication techniques. Even if you meant 2-3 feet, and held yourself back to the major moons (say, Luna, the four Galilean satellites, Titan, and Triton), it’d still be quite a piece of work. And if you want all the planets to be to the same scale as the orbits, there’s no way you’ll get it to fit into a house.
For comparison: The orbit of Pluto is nearly 40 AU across, so if you have a three-foot diameter orrery, that would make the Earth’s orbit about an inch in diameter, and a third of that for Mercury. Now, on your half-inch Earth arm, you want an arm for the Moon, a tiny fraction of that distance from the Earth. You begin to see the problem?
My suggestion would be to either do one of just the inner solar system (out to, say, Mars or Jupiter), or to ignore accuracy completely, and just have a decorative conversation piece.
Firstly, that was a typo on my part and apparently the board will not let me edit my own posts. I did mean 2 feet to 3 feet in diameter. I could go larger but no smaller. I didn’t mean for the planets themselves to be to scale. I figured that the orbits could be slown down using larger gears for the outer planets and smaller for the inner.
I realize this is probably a pipe dream. There are no real artisins anymore. Everything is mass produced or not made. It’s a shame really. The beuty of such a finely crafted piece of art would probably not be apprecaited anymore. Most people look at the astrolabe I have hanging on my wall and ask if it’s some kind of family crest.
There are plenty of real artisans around. (Pick up a copy of Fine Woodworking to see what I mean.) What there * is * is a shortage of people who are willing and able to pay what the art is worth. What you are describing will probably take months to construct. Can you commission a work of art that will end up costing at least 10-20K?
Nothing wrong with mass production, by the way. If the average consumer had any conceivable use for an orrery, that multi-thousand dollar piece of art would cost as little as a CD-player.