Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Orrery

An orrery, a planetary display model

     It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single living room in possession of good furnishings must be in want of an "orrery". Never heard of one you say? What century have you been living in? Oops, I seem to be 300 years too late, I've missed the heyday of these display models of heliocentric planetary systems.

"A Philospher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun," Joseph Wright (1766)