Beautiful Bokeh: Breaking Ground on an Orrery

Remember that room in the Dark Crystal with the huge machine that made the planets all fly around? Did your grade school teacher use an electric model of the solar system to show you how Copernicus kicked Ptolemy’s ass in the who-revolves-around-whom fight?

Those things are orreries and we want one.

Brenda and I have commissioned our first work of art, and it’s an orrery. We’ve hired a very old friend of mine Eugene Sargent to design and build it. He’s an artist now working out of Northwest Arkansas. He’s never built an orrery but it happens he’s just taken delivery of a brand new CNC machine and he is itching for a project to try it out and this is perfect.

The reference images we gave him included some actual orrery replicas but also good portions of sci-fi, steam/clock punk stuff as well obviously.

Working only from a verbal brief and a collection of reference images (above), he’s passed the designing phase and bits and pieces of it are starting to come together. We gave him a ton of freedom to make it his own, as we wanted it to be original and not simply a quasi-replica of an ancient one. However we did impose one restriction in that we wanted it to be hand-cranked, not motorized in any way. He did some calculations and we agreed that the goal would be to have one crank be equivalent to one fortnight. That would keep the speed of the “planets’ under control, but would still be fast enough to make it fun to crank.

Well he’s been at it for a while and we just received an update along with some photos he took of the gear designs. It’s looking awesome. We definitely went to the right guy for this...there is a shitton of math involved in making this work, and Eugene’s brain is as adept technically as it is creatively. Get this: He’s not even using CAD software (!) but instead has written his own C++ programs to generate the “G-Code.” Presumably “G” is the kind of “code” CAD machines need in order to make badass orreries.

Incredibly, he’s even forging the bronze himself. The disks you see on the left were liquid metal until he cast them into shape. Unbelievable the amount of trouble he’s going to to make this thing.

The rough plan, evidently, is for each planet to have its revolution speed set by a unique, large cog, and all the primary planetary cogs will be arranged in a kind of stack. With their unique cut-outs, that should make for interesting patterns when the planets are in motion.

Speaking of planets, how far out should we go? We’re not sure yet. Poor controversial Pluto is almost certainly off the list. Most of the original orreries didn’t go out that far obviously since those outer planets were discovered later, and they revolve so slowly it would be pretty boring to include them anyway. It’s looking like Jupiter or Saturn might be as far as we go. Saturn is a pretty slow revolver itself but you know....it has rings. So maybe out to Saturn. We’ll see. Part of it depends on what Eugene thinks makes sense based on the design he’s selected.

Another topic we’ve settled is whether there should be a moon orbiting the earth, as it orbits the sun. We have decided there should most definitely be a moon. It just doesn’t seem like an orrery without at least one orbit-within-orbit goin’ on.