In between watching the blood moon last night - gorgeous - and going back inside because it is tooooo cold at 1 F, I stumbled upon a site that creates and sells personalized space time coordinated mementoes. Surely, those of us with a can do this ourselves… The raw data is provided by NASA and hence in the public domain. So I did some sleuthing and found this calculator that you can set in many different ways and thought it might be useful for this purpose. I definitely will be working on an acrylic plate for my husband using his birthday. Next anniversary, maybe one calculated on our wedding day. Solar System Live
You can toggle many variables, so play with it for a bit if you are at all interested.
The inner solar system looked like this on my date of birth:
As I am finding - it takes a little work to get a workable svg file. So far I’m going down the following path.
Set variables as you wish with color scheme set to black on white background. Image size set to 1200. Save image.
Pull image into an image editor and adjust the color balance, so that brightness is off and contrast in mid range. This step gives more definition to the orbits, otherwise you loose some of that fine detail. (result on the left)
Pull that image into Inkscape, or similar program. Trace bitmap using edge detection, remove background and see what you get. Don’t forget to delete the old image you just traced beneath it. (svg on the right)
I wonder if you could do the paths on acrylic, set in stones/gems/something translucent for the planets - and then do a layered edge-lit box…for a family you could do spouse 1 | spouse 2 | marriage | kid 1 | kid 2 etc…
All good ideas @deirdrebeth! Printed out a draft image of our wedding day but haven’t done anything with that yet. I’m currently working on a box with the lid showing the planets in their orbits on the day a person was born. Using wood though and will cut the planets separately and a little bigger and will color those in.
- and going back inside because it is tooooo cold at 1 F, I stumbled upon a site that creates and sells personalized space time coordinated mementoes. Surely, those of us with a 
can do this ourselves… The raw data is provided by NASA and hence in the public domain. So I did some sleuthing and found this calculator that you can set in many different ways and thought it might be useful for this purpose. I definitely will be working on an acrylic plate for my husband using his birthday. Next anniversary, maybe one calculated on our wedding day.
