Description

Planisphere is a star chart and an almanac: the two ways people have kept the sky and the year for two thousand years.

The chart is a planisphere, Ptolemy's heavens laid flat on a disc, the turning rete of a medieval astrolabe, the paper star wheel of the 1900s. Your own sky turns behind the card's oval window, with the Moon in its phase, the planets and the Milky Way, and the Sun rides the ring as the hour hand. The weather, from Open-Meteo, drifts over the village below. Eclipses are drawn as they happen.

The almanac is after the shepherds' calendars of the 1490s. Its line gives the next sunrise or sunset and the sky's news: planets meeting, a meteor shower. Keep any of twelve calendars and their days are named there, the great ones in red as in the Books of Hours: the Christian and Eastern years, old English customs, the fire festivals, ancient Rome, the United States, Britain and Ireland, and the Hebrew, Chinese, Islamic and Hindu calendars. Each has its emblem, after the old carved calendar sticks; some light every window or fires on the hills, some bring fireworks each evening hour. Christmas Eve names its first star; at Qixi the magpies bridge the Weaver and the Cowherd; a rabbit sits in the Mid-Autumn moon. The Labours of the Months may show faint in the card.

Ten plates after real charts and instruments: a paper planisphere, Burritt's atlas (1835), Flamsteed's (1729), an astrolabe, a Book of Hours, Prague's clock (1410), a cyanotype, Apian's woodcut (1540), a red night-vision plate, a plain night. A settings page shows the face live as you choose.