The Solar System: September, AD 15605

[töff]

The ring assignments ....

[töff]

Crapweasels ... I flubbed Neptune's double allotment.

Well, it gives me a chance to redo the spheres as equally spaced. I'm not sure I like the way the inner planets get cramped in that first version -- it's reminiscent of real life, which I was hoping to posterize into nothing. I kinda like the "everybody even" concept, totally equitable abstraction of scale. But on the other hand, I also like the variation in the unequal ring spacings. I like things to be unequal sometimes, not overly ordered and regimented. Hmm! Grr. Time to make up my min-n-nd. Poor Charlie, tough decision!

I'm leaning toward the unequals (repaired below, on the left). I think the medieval "all spheres are equal" is not gonna survive. Oh well! Cake and eat it, right?

Isn't it funny how you hit all these particular stages in a project, when things get decided, and they really can't be changed afterwards. Too bad! I really strive for "tweak it later" flexibility, but it just can't be had sometimes.

[töff]

This is so not a tutorial.

[töff]

In a half-hearted attempt to rescue this throg (thread/blog) from complete deviation from any sort of tutorial value at all, I thought to do a screen shot or two and describe how I am accomplishing some things. So ...

My next task was to place my planets around the rings at their ecliptic longitudes. I distilled the numbers I needed from the previous list, rounding to the nearest degree. Then I put a white dot on each orbit ring. (This means ecliptic longitude zero is straight down. I'll rotate the whole system later anyway.)

I've found that one easy way (there's many) to rotate an object around the edge of a circle (an orbit) is to create another set of dots mirrored on the other side of the origin (the Sun's postition). I filled the mirrors with a different color; you'll see why in a moment.

Then just group each planet with its mirror, and when you choose the ROTATE tool, it automatically sets the pivot point at the sun, which is the common center of the planet & its mirror.

So, just punch the desired rotation into the Transform panel, and woohoo, here's Mercury and Venus already rotated, and Earth just done too, still selected and its rotation shown in the panel.

After they're all rotated, I'll just select all the gray mirrors and delete them (or better yet, defill & destroke them to retain rotatability). If they weren't a different color, it'd be a nightmare to pick the mirrors out from the real planets, because you'd just see a whole lotta white dots rotated all over the system ... try it; you'll see.

This is in Adobe Illustrator CS3, btw.

[töff]

Now I've got them all placed.

If I keep a minimum amount of space around each planet (the ugly green circles), I can crop off a lot of the system on the top. Sedna threw a monkey into the wrench, and prevents me from cropping anything off the left. Oh well.

Dare I check how the positions compare to the previous screenshots from that other astro calculator?

[ravells]

Keep going, I'm finding this a fascinating read! I can't comment because I've got nothing constructive to contribute, but I'm enjoying the education!

[RobA]

Just brainstorming, another way to represent the planets symbolically and still hint at the scale is to offset the orbits:

rect3331.png

BTW, toff, this thread is an interesting read!

-Rob A>