He's got an orrery!

I've always wanted a mechanical, clockwork orrery, because, well, because they're cool. They're also quite big and expensive, so I decided to get my french-sounding virtual slave to build me a digital one as part of my series of experiments with time and data visualisation.

Space and time are cool

Here you go - the solar system as a clock (kind of)!

It starts from "now" by default, but you you can set it to any date and time you like.

You can also speed it up to varying degrees, run time backwards, spin it around, focus in on any given planet / moon, and even turn a constellation map on and off.

The sun, planets etc. are scaled up by default and distances are condensed to make for a nicer visualisation, but you can enable a "true scale" mode too.

It turns out that space is really quite big!

Neat, huh?

Now I just need to turn it into a live desktop for my Mac...

Honourable mentions

Claude built it all very easily and quickly using Opus 5.5 on Medium effort.

Hat tip to anyone who picked up the sneaky reference to Maureen Lipman as Beatie Bellman in the 1987 BT advert in the title of this blog post. There's no school like the old school.