Hi all,
It was fun to reconstruct the state of the solar system on May 8, 1774.
Why that date?
On that day the moon, Mercurius, Venus, Mars and Jupiter would come
together in the sign of Aries. This led to panic, as the cosmos was by
many expected to collapse. An amateur astronomer, Eise Eisinga from
Franeker (The Netherlands) wanted to show his fellow citizens the real
cause of the conjunction and convince them that nothing would happen. He
set out to build a planetarium in his living room that showed the
Copernican layout of the solar system. The task took him 8 years (too
late for the fatal date, that indeed passed smoothly).
The planetarium, however, is still with us and is the oldest working
planaterium in the world. Recently it was recoginized by UNESCO as a
World Heritage Site.
See http://www.planetarium-friesland.nl/engels.html.
Thanks for the link!
Frans Maes
On 23-4-2011 18:36, Frederick Jaggi wrote:
A company called Dynamic Designs produced this very interesting orrery
based on NASA data as a demonstration piece:
http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/work/orrery/
Frederick Jaggi
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
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