Oh man, I got a 3D printer. What a blast this thing is.
It started like this. I was on a conference call with a blind colleague, and she asked “so, are there only about seven stars in the constellation Lyra? That’s what I’m feeling on this star chart.”
I probably was alarming in my hasty reply. “Oh a LOT more.” But that hardly conveys it. Many a late summer night I’ve spent marveling at this particular part of the sky. Vega blazes high overhead, resplendent in her blue party dress, a belle of the ball 147 trillion miles away. Crowds of revelers swarm around her, the summer milky way billowing through the ancient stories of swams, foxes, eagles, arrows, wrestlers of snakes…Peering closer at the constellation, fine double stars snap into focus, and staring back is a giant “space eye”, the Ring Nebula. It actually looks like a cheerio, floating in a cosmic bowl. A star a bit larger than our Sun is in the final stages of life, and the outer layers of gas are thrown off, irradiated by the hot central core.
Nearby, 80,000 ancient suns huddle up in the globular cluster M56, which is…
Ah, pardon me, I’ve gone on a tangent, haven’t I?
When the phone call ended with the Lyra question, I ran out into the garage with a printed star chart of the constellation. Stapling it to a scrap of a 2x4, I drilled holes corresponding to the magnitudes of the stars, and…
It didn’t work at all.
I finally got a 3D printer. The lunar craters translate well for a tactile experience (think detailed braille.) But Lyra remains the prize.
After fiddling around with some software to convert a .jpg to an .stl file, and importing into TinkerCad, I had a few prints. They’re not quite there yet. I’m reminded more of mites victimized by a plastic Pompeii, which doesn’t exactly translate the splendor of the summer sky to touch. I’ll be working on this, though. If you have any suggestions, or you’d like to try yourself, let me know! I’d love to build up a printable library of charts! Time to fire up the ol’ factory….