Hey everyone,

I just finished a massive project that I've been working on for about a year now, with a team of 7 other engineering students.

On May 6, 2012, we unveiled the Andrews Hall Grand Orrery. It is a working model of the Solar System, with linearly-scaled orbital periods and logarithmically-scaled planet radii and orbital radii. We designed, built, and installed the orrery ourselves, with the permission and guidance of professors and structural engineers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeZHO81Vz_o

Enjoy! Three days until graduation!

-Eitan

Very cool I really want to major in Mechanical Engineering when I go to college, great to see some of the projects actual engineering students work on

Hey Eitan, great choice of music for the event

What sort of precision does the Orrery have? How many "years" can it run before the position of some of the planets is off by more than 1% or so?

That’s really cool! What is the time scale? (e.g. 2 days per minute)

Very nice!
But.... it doesn't seem to work on solar power eh?

Sounds nice. However I can't view YouTube at work. Could you post a few pictures?

Carl

Thanks everyone!

The time scale is about 2088 to 1. This corresponds to Mercury orbiting the Sun once every hour, Earth orbiting every 4.5 hours, and Pluto going around every 43 days. In the video, it is going significantly faster than that, for the sake of demonstration at the unveiling. Mercury went around in about 16 seconds, and Pluto went around in 4.5 hours.

The length and radius scales are both logarithmic. This includes the sun, but it does not include the rings on Saturn, since they would have looked like a stubby belt if we had done them on the log scale.

Here's a link to a set of pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65033328@N ... 636166178/

-Eitan