My Labyrinth Orrery, And So Can You!
Mar. 11th, 2018 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nenya_kanadka(Post I've been meaning to make for the better part of a year--finally getting around to it! Title after Stephen Colbert's "I Am America, And So Can You.")
In my front yard I have a meditation labyrinth thatmuccamukk's mom created years ago. It's also an orrery for the planets of our solar system. Whenever I mention it people think it's pretty cool, so I thought I'd do a writeup.
An orrery (quoth Wikipedia) is "a mechanical model of the solar system that illustrates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the planets." It does not have to be to scale (and in fact usually isn't) and it may or may not be set up to move under its own power. This one is human-powered in the sense that every ten days I go out on my lawn and move the various planets around to their latest relative positions.
A labyrinth is a maze-like pattern you can walk for meditation purposes or just for fun. Many of them are laid out more or less as concentric circles, which proved handy when Mucca's mom decided to use the big labyrinth on the front lawn to set up her orrery.
You can obviously have a labyrinth without an orrery, or vice versa, but in our case they are two tastes that taste great together. :D
My Labyrinth Orrery
We have two labyrinths on our lawn, built ages ago by Mucca's parents (who are labyrinth experts and enthusiasts). The one on our front lawn is a Chartres-style labyrinth, and looks like this:
This labyrinth is something of a living sculpture. The paths are edged in longer grass and the turnings and centre are decorated with stones, beach glass, driftwood, bits of pottery, glass fishing floats, and other neat things that wash up on the beach.
So it's changing all the time, as bits are added or removed (I'm sure the passing hikers swipe things occasionally, and when Mucca's mom moved away she took some things). What I didn't know for several years after I met the labyrinth and walked it a dozen times was that some of those glass balls and rocks and pieces of pottery stand in for the planets!
Mercury: spiral-shaped piece of driftwood; Venus: pale purple ocean-smoothed glass telegraph insulator; Earth: 4" glass fishing float; Mars: red & black pottery vase; Jupiter: 12" glass fishing float; Saturn: 12" glass fishing float with net; Uranus: white spiral shell; Neptune: green plastic sandcastle-making mold shaped like cartoon fish; Pluto: heart-shaped rock on black & white speckled rock.
Most of these were selected by Mucca's mom, though they've been replaced and reshuffled over the years. I like how they are all related somehow to the planet they're supposed to stand in for. Mercury small and brownish, Venus curvy and femme, Mars red, etc. I love the fishing net wrapped around Saturn to make its "rings" and how instantly recognizable that makes Saturn vs Jupiter. The little swirly shell for Uranus sometimes slides down off its big rock, and then it's rotating sideways like it ought to be. ;) Pluto is a little heart-shaped rock against a bigger black rock with little white specks, which stands in for the Oort Cloud.
Neptune is all my fault. :D (I asked Mucca's mom if the green plastic fish would disrupt the energy of the ~all natural~ labyrinth, and she laughed at me and then said it was now my labyrinth to set the tone of, so I feel that we are continuing a long tradition of not taking ourselves seriously here. <3)
....And So Can You!
If you're interested, you can make something like this pretty easily.
What you need:
What you do:
I set my orrery about once every ten days (on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month), which gives enough time for things to visibly move--Mercury moves three or four feet in that time, Mars more like eighteen inches, and Venus and Earth somewhere in between. Jupiter moves about one degree every ten days (so around 3° per month). It's always a fun day when I get to say I moved Jupiter. :D Saturn moves about half that fast, or 3° every two months or so. Neptune and Uranus move even slower, and Pluto I will have in the same place until February 2019!
I have one circle each for Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and then because the outer planets all move so very slowly, I just have Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto all arranged around the outer rim on the same circle. This simplifies things. But you can do nine circles if you want, or ignore Pluto entirely, or add in various asteroids--whatever you want.
The outer rim of my labyrinth is edged with big rocks (about a foot or so across). These are spaced at approximately three degrees apart. I find that every 3° is a useful division of the circle for an orrery at this size, but you could mark yours off at every five degrees or ten if that worked better for you. As noted above, I also have the 0°, 90°, 180° and 270° points marked out, so if something needs to be at 108°, I can start counting from 90° rather than zero.
So, on a day when I'm updating my labyrinth orrery, I go to Cosine Kitty and write down the ecliptic longitude coordinates for that day. This will give me something like Mercury 87°, Venus 27°, Earth 171°, and Mars 227° (that's today, March 11, 2018 at 1900 hours, at Cosine Kitty).
So then I figure out where those points are on the outer rim of the circle: Mercury at 87° is three degrees before 90°, so I find the big rock that marks 90° and then pick the rock right before it. (Each rock is 3° from the previous one, remember.) Then I look towards the big rock (the "Sun") at the centre of the labyrinth and sight a straight line from there to where I'm standing. The point where this line intersects the circle Mercury is on is where the Mercury marker needs to be.
I repeat this for the other planets: Venus at 27° is 9 rocks past the zero/360° point. Earth at 171° is 9 degrees (or three rocks) before 180°. Mars is at 227°, which doesn't quite work out evenly: that's 43° before the 270° point, which turns out to be 14 1/3 rocks away. You can decide at this point whether to round down (put your marker at the "14 rocks before 270°" point) or whether to estimate where 43° would actually be. Totally up to you.
If your circle isn't divided into increments of three (or 5 or 10 or whatever) degrees, it still works; you just need another method of figuring out where your markers should go. If you're doing it on a small scale like a piece of notebook paper, you could use a protractor and a straight edge for this.
When Jupiter or Saturn has moved through a full three degrees, I take the big glass ball in question and swap it with the next rock in the big outer circle. I probably disturb some bugs while I'm at it! The other outer planets, which are markers set on top of the big stones, just get picked up and moved along to the next rock when they've advanced three whole degrees.
The neat thing about all this is that you can fairly easily set up a system that illustrates where the various planets are in relation to one another and the sun, and how fast they're moving, in terms of degrees of a circle. In other words, you can know if Mars is on the same side of the sun as Earth is, and how fast Mercury goes around the sun, and whether Venus is passing in front of Jupiter. And since you have markers set out for each planet, you can then go stand at Earth and look around to see where the other planets will appear as seen from our perspective.
The even neater thing is that it's all in motion, and as you update it, you can actually watch the solar system move in more or less real time.
Bonus Sock Doll Pics:
I have a little doll I made out of a sock last year, the "proof of concept" for a string of dolls I ended up making later. Her name is Anna and she's a little alien with naturally blue-green hair. Here she is exploring our solar system.
Anna visits Mercury, makes Earth gay:
Anna is impressed with Jupiter, discovers Pluto:
Feel free to ask any questions in comments! :D
In my front yard I have a meditation labyrinth that
muccamukk's mom created years ago. It's also an orrery for the planets of our solar system. Whenever I mention it people think it's pretty cool, so I thought I'd do a writeup. An orrery (quoth Wikipedia) is "a mechanical model of the solar system that illustrates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the planets." It does not have to be to scale (and in fact usually isn't) and it may or may not be set up to move under its own power. This one is human-powered in the sense that every ten days I go out on my lawn and move the various planets around to their latest relative positions.
A labyrinth is a maze-like pattern you can walk for meditation purposes or just for fun. Many of them are laid out more or less as concentric circles, which proved handy when Mucca's mom decided to use the big labyrinth on the front lawn to set up her orrery.
You can obviously have a labyrinth without an orrery, or vice versa, but in our case they are two tastes that taste great together. :D
My Labyrinth Orrery
We have two labyrinths on our lawn, built ages ago by Mucca's parents (who are labyrinth experts and enthusiasts). The one on our front lawn is a Chartres-style labyrinth, and looks like this:
This labyrinth is something of a living sculpture. The paths are edged in longer grass and the turnings and centre are decorated with stones, beach glass, driftwood, bits of pottery, glass fishing floats, and other neat things that wash up on the beach.
 |
  |
So it's changing all the time, as bits are added or removed (I'm sure the passing hikers swipe things occasionally, and when Mucca's mom moved away she took some things). What I didn't know for several years after I met the labyrinth and walked it a dozen times was that some of those glass balls and rocks and pieces of pottery stand in for the planets!
Mercury: spiral-shaped piece of driftwood; Venus: pale purple ocean-smoothed glass telegraph insulator; Earth: 4" glass fishing float; Mars: red & black pottery vase; Jupiter: 12" glass fishing float; Saturn: 12" glass fishing float with net; Uranus: white spiral shell; Neptune: green plastic sandcastle-making mold shaped like cartoon fish; Pluto: heart-shaped rock on black & white speckled rock.
Most of these were selected by Mucca's mom, though they've been replaced and reshuffled over the years. I like how they are all related somehow to the planet they're supposed to stand in for. Mercury small and brownish, Venus curvy and femme, Mars red, etc. I love the fishing net wrapped around Saturn to make its "rings" and how instantly recognizable that makes Saturn vs Jupiter. The little swirly shell for Uranus sometimes slides down off its big rock, and then it's rotating sideways like it ought to be. ;) Pluto is a little heart-shaped rock against a bigger black rock with little white specks, which stands in for the Oort Cloud.
Neptune is all my fault. :D (I asked Mucca's mom if the green plastic fish would disrupt the energy of the ~all natural~ labyrinth, and she laughed at me and then said it was now my labyrinth to set the tone of, so I feel that we are continuing a long tradition of not taking ourselves seriously here. <3)
....And So Can You!
If you're interested, you can make something like this pretty easily.
What you need:
- a marker for each planet you want to depict -- These can be anything from thumbtacks on a corkboard to little stones on a tabletop to the glass fishing floats & pottery vases I have on my lawn-sized orrery.
(You could probably even draw your solar system on a piece of paper and mark the planets in coloured pens or stickers -- you'd just have to decide whether to re-draw the whole thing every time you updated it or whether you wanted to just add in the new positions of the planets each time and sort of leave a trail behind each travelling object.) - a solar system layout -- A big circle, basically. You want a spot in the middle for the sun, and then several concentric circles, one for each planet's orbit. Mucca's mum has a demo version she carries around, made out of fabric stretched across an embroidery hoop. Yours certainly doesn't have to be this complex (hers is again based on the Chartres labyrinth, and she's got the various astrology signs in there, for example), but it's a good example of a portable size. Her planet markers are pins on a string, and the shiny circle about halfway out from the centre is Earth's orbit:
You may also want to mark the 0°, 90°, 180° and 270° points on the circle (divide it in quarters, basically) to make it easier to figure out where to lay down your planetary markers. Here are mine; the entire labyrinth is oriented with 0° facing east.
- a way to find out where the planets are -- Luckily, there are a bunch of websites that tell you this! The one I'm using has the adorable name of Cosine Kitty. For this one you want to set "Cartesian coordinates" to "Heliocentric", and "Angular coordinates" to "Ecliptic." Then you just read down the column called "Ecl. Long." (ecliptic longitude): those tell you where to put each planet. You can let Cosine Kitty automatically update to today's date and time, or you can input whatever date you want.
What you do:
I set my orrery about once every ten days (on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month), which gives enough time for things to visibly move--Mercury moves three or four feet in that time, Mars more like eighteen inches, and Venus and Earth somewhere in between. Jupiter moves about one degree every ten days (so around 3° per month). It's always a fun day when I get to say I moved Jupiter. :D Saturn moves about half that fast, or 3° every two months or so. Neptune and Uranus move even slower, and Pluto I will have in the same place until February 2019!
I have one circle each for Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and then because the outer planets all move so very slowly, I just have Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto all arranged around the outer rim on the same circle. This simplifies things. But you can do nine circles if you want, or ignore Pluto entirely, or add in various asteroids--whatever you want.
The outer rim of my labyrinth is edged with big rocks (about a foot or so across). These are spaced at approximately three degrees apart. I find that every 3° is a useful division of the circle for an orrery at this size, but you could mark yours off at every five degrees or ten if that worked better for you. As noted above, I also have the 0°, 90°, 180° and 270° points marked out, so if something needs to be at 108°, I can start counting from 90° rather than zero.
So, on a day when I'm updating my labyrinth orrery, I go to Cosine Kitty and write down the ecliptic longitude coordinates for that day. This will give me something like Mercury 87°, Venus 27°, Earth 171°, and Mars 227° (that's today, March 11, 2018 at 1900 hours, at Cosine Kitty).
So then I figure out where those points are on the outer rim of the circle: Mercury at 87° is three degrees before 90°, so I find the big rock that marks 90° and then pick the rock right before it. (Each rock is 3° from the previous one, remember.) Then I look towards the big rock (the "Sun") at the centre of the labyrinth and sight a straight line from there to where I'm standing. The point where this line intersects the circle Mercury is on is where the Mercury marker needs to be.
I repeat this for the other planets: Venus at 27° is 9 rocks past the zero/360° point. Earth at 171° is 9 degrees (or three rocks) before 180°. Mars is at 227°, which doesn't quite work out evenly: that's 43° before the 270° point, which turns out to be 14 1/3 rocks away. You can decide at this point whether to round down (put your marker at the "14 rocks before 270°" point) or whether to estimate where 43° would actually be. Totally up to you.
If your circle isn't divided into increments of three (or 5 or 10 or whatever) degrees, it still works; you just need another method of figuring out where your markers should go. If you're doing it on a small scale like a piece of notebook paper, you could use a protractor and a straight edge for this.
When Jupiter or Saturn has moved through a full three degrees, I take the big glass ball in question and swap it with the next rock in the big outer circle. I probably disturb some bugs while I'm at it! The other outer planets, which are markers set on top of the big stones, just get picked up and moved along to the next rock when they've advanced three whole degrees.
The neat thing about all this is that you can fairly easily set up a system that illustrates where the various planets are in relation to one another and the sun, and how fast they're moving, in terms of degrees of a circle. In other words, you can know if Mars is on the same side of the sun as Earth is, and how fast Mercury goes around the sun, and whether Venus is passing in front of Jupiter. And since you have markers set out for each planet, you can then go stand at Earth and look around to see where the other planets will appear as seen from our perspective.
The even neater thing is that it's all in motion, and as you update it, you can actually watch the solar system move in more or less real time.
Bonus Sock Doll Pics:
I have a little doll I made out of a sock last year, the "proof of concept" for a string of dolls I ended up making later. Her name is Anna and she's a little alien with naturally blue-green hair. Here she is exploring our solar system.
Anna visits Mercury, makes Earth gay:
Anna is impressed with Jupiter, discovers Pluto:
Feel free to ask any questions in comments! :D
