Celestial Sphere with constellation and star locations by dennd

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This project is an addition /extension to the Celestial Sphere models posted on Thingiverse by sphynx In December of 2012. www.thingiverse.com/thing:36413 for details about his project.
This project includes Openscad code that can produce stl files for a celestial sphere. The openscad customization window provides the option to change many parameters and produce a 3d model of the celestial sphere that could include more than 1700 of the brightest stars and up to 50 constellations.
I have also provided .stl files for several different Celestial Sphere models.
I am planning to include an equatorial type of mount, complete with provision for LED lighting inside the sphere. I am thinking about clocking the model to match the actual rotational position of the stars in the sky. Also considering additional complex mechanical mechanisms to include the actual positions of the sun and the noon in real time. I may include some or all of these additions if I can work out the math and design a system to emulate the movements.
According to Wikipedia:
"In astronomy and navigation, the celestial sphere is an imaginary sphere of arbitrarily large radius, concentric with the observer. All objects in the observer's sky can be thought of as projected upon the inside surface of the celestial sphere, as if it were the underside of a dome or a hemispherical screen. The celestial sphere is a practical tool for spherical astronomy, allowing observers to plot positions of objects in the sky when their distances are unknown or unimportant."
If you look up into the night sky, you can imagine that the stars are projected onto the inside of a sphere that surrounds the earth. This is the Celestial Sphere. As the Earth spins around it's North/South axis every 24 hours, so the stars appear to rotate around the North and South Poles. Another way of looking at this, is that you can imagine the Earth being stationary and the Celestial Sphere rotating around the Earth once every 24 hours.