Just head over to Make your own planisphere - In-The-Sky.org and enter your latitude (+/- 5º) and preferred language. It will return the PDFs needed to make one out of paper, so you have two options: 1) convert the PDFs to cut/engrave files or 2) print them out and use the GF’s image trace magic.
Downloaded the one for my latitude too. It will be fun to decide what material to use for it. edge lit acrylic (lit with red leds of course) might be an interesting option for the rotating sky disk and elevation scale on the clear cover…
This place is a fount of idea and technique!
The forum members are to be commended. Combined, they form an impressive deposit of creativity and capability.
Throw an idea out and watch what happens to that seed.
@erin, I measured my hands and arms, too! People may look at me funny when I go to yard sales and measure furniture by laying my arms along it, but it works great.
Have to add that it might be especially worth having some kind of measuring device on your person if you’ve spent a great deal of your life dealing with computer models. I was shocked when my mechanical-engineer partner and I started cooking together and he estimated wildly, wildly large sizes for standard measurements (i.e., “one-inch” strips were pretty close to 2", and he’d INSIST, BY GOD! that they were one inch, same with requested 1/4" chunks being actually closer to 5/8"). It turned out that even though he builds tons of precision medical devices by hand, he deals with nearly all the measurements in CAD. Whenever he was working on parts in SolidWorks, he’d zoom in on them some intuitively consistent amount, and had internalized the measurements he was seeing as correct.
In contrast, when I was a bookbinder and calligrapher, I spent years hunched over paper and rulers, making sure that things were within a few hundredths of an inch of each other, so my intuitive sense of imperial measurements is now pretty damned perfect. I was going bats last week trying to cook omelets with him and getting 2" hunks of onions and peppers, so I swore the first thing I would make on Glowforge was going to be a dishwasher-safe mini-ruler with a hole in it for hanging it on the fridge.
I can’t find any fingers or other bits that are precisely 2" long so I’m sticking with my Post-It Note.
To @morganstanfield’s story about CAD workers having trouble translating that to the read world, a few lifetimes ago, when most drafting was done by hand, I and another guy got brought into the drafting department of a ship builder to audit all the pipe hanger drawings (it’s a bigger deal than it sounds like). In one case, we had conflicting information from different drawings so we had to go out to the ship to see what was physically installed. We’re standing in the engine room and I point at the pipe in question and the other guy says “How do you know that’s the right pipe?” Well, it’s the only 4" pipe 2’ from the center-line, and 3’ above the deck. “But how do you know?” Because the drawings we have been staring at all week say so. He fully understood how to read the drawings but he couldn’t relate that to the real world.
In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the awesomely funny, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman had a lot to say about that phenomenon (people being able to read drawings or memorize concepts without being able to translate them to the real world). He was a huge proponent of having all science education be based in hands-on experimentation for exactly that reason. (It’s a great book, by the way, if you haven’t read it.)
Haven’t had the chance to measure fingers or arms yet, but I do know that my typical walking stride is roughly 2 feet per step- a quick study during one of my architecture classes that vastly improved my drawing ability when sketching buildings and public spaces.
@morganstanfield I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I still fall victim to the same thing! My sense of scale within a digital model is still a bit wonky when it comes to understanding just how big it will translate to in the real world. Best example: I was working on a project in school where we had to make an inflatable structure. My two teammates and I came up with a big dome that would be made out of recycled heat-seamed plastic bags. Since we were short on time, the entire design and patterning process was done within Rhino, no prototyping before plotting the final patterns. Our assembly was 8 large panels each built out of 4 smaller assembled strips. When we when to print out the pattern? Just one of those smaller strips took up the max size our big plotters could print! Long story short- the three of us pulled an all-nighter sitting on the floor heat seaming plastic bags together with just one heat seamer between the three of us I should look to see if I have any photos of the final structure…upside, our entire class could fit inside quite comfortably!
Sounds like one of those wonderful, last-minute-terror projects that pretty much anyone who’s gone to college has had. And, super-cool. I’d love to see pics.
Yep- that about sums up my entire college experience I’ll hunt around for pictures! I wonder whatever even happened to that project…we never actually disassembled it or threw it out lol
A few other tricks to guesstimating sizes are looking at floor tiles sizes and determine 8, 10, or 12" sizes and measure accordingly. Also, 2x2 or 2x4’ ceiling acoustic tiling. Years of corporate installation for business phone systems and CAT cabling.
It has been odd working with actual-size models since I started designing for 3D back when I had my 3D printer. I’m used to our plans being drawn at 1:1, but then scaled to 1"=40’ or 1"=20’… So I’m used to looking at them at scale. (I can, however, translate things between my plans and the real world pretty easily.) The first time I printed a cube and it came out exactly 18mm I was pretty excited.
Yeah!! A lot of architecture studio spaces (at least, a lot I’ve seen within US colleges) have an exposed waffle concrete slab for the ceiling as a means of allowing students a quick measuring tool for building their spatial awareness.
I measure feet pretty accurately by walking heel to toe in my tennis shoes. And the tip of my finger to the topmost knuckle wrinkle line is very close to one inch. The older I get, the more reference lines I find!
Yes! I as well have an ingrained sense of imperial measurements from all of my bookbinding projects. Only now I’m having to switch over to metric measurements, and my mental grasp of how large a measurement 20 cm actually is (for example) is still rather shaky. Metric is much easier in the long run, but changing habits is so much harder!
Found some pictures!! While the day (and night) of construction wasn’t necessarily the best of times while doing it, I now look back fondly on this project Here are some process shots-
I should look to see if I have any photos of the final structure…upside, our entire class could fit inside quite comfortably!
that pretty much anyone who’s gone to college has had. And, super-cool. I’d love to see pics.
I’ll hunt around for pictures! I wonder whatever even happened to that project…we never actually disassembled it or threw it out lol
Here are some process shots-
