A clockwork model of the solar system · Kepler orbits
A mechanical model of the solar system — brass planets on geared arms, turned by clockwork, so each one sweeps around the Sun at its correct relative speed. It is a machine for showing how the thing moves, rather than what it looks like.
The word is really a person. Around 1713 John Rowley built one, to a design by George Graham, for Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery. The patron's title ended up attached to the object and stuck, so an English earldom quietly became a noun.
The camera moves like a camera. It opens tight and in the plane of the ecliptic and pulls back to the working view, so the scale of the thing is stated before you have read a single control. Selecting a body eases across rather than cutting, and bows outward through the middle of the move — crossing from Mercury to Neptune pulls right back on the way, because the distance between them is the only thing worth showing. Touch anything and the move stops immediately; an animation you cannot interrupt is a trap.
Narration reads the cards aloud, and the voice is yours to choose under §06. The list is ranked rather than alphabetical, so the neural and network voices sit at the top and your system's novelty voices are at the bottom. Your pick is remembered.
Real orreries are deliberately not to scale — honest distances would put Neptune in the next room. They encode periods and phases instead. This one keeps that bargain: the orbits and timings are real, the globes are drawn big enough to see. What no brass model could do is run the clock backwards, or make a sound.
Click any planet or comet. The card gives you its numbers and a fact; More steps through the rest, with a counter so you can see how many there are. Earth carries four subjects — Earth, Moon, Apollo, Artemis — shown as chips you can tap straight to, because Apollo cannot be drawn at this scale and would otherwise be buried five presses deep. Spacecraft are clickable too, on their trajectories. Narration is on by default, so it reads them aloud and ducks the music while it speaks — the toggle is in §04, and if you switch it off it stays off next time.
Craft & thrusters is a separate level for everything the spacecraft makes — attitude puffs, reaction wheels, the plasma line, and the drives over in Known Space. They sit on two buses because they need different places in the field, but one control moves both.
§04 has a master Volume and a three-band EQ — low shelf at 180 Hz, a mid bell at 1.1 kHz, high shelf at 3.6 kHz, with a Flat reset. Both sit before the limiter, so the limiter still has the last word.
The bed itself reports distance. Pull the view out toward the Oort cloud and the room lengthens, a sub arrives that is not there close in, and the top thins away — so the sound is telling you the scale rather than decorating it. Voices sit a few cents apart and beat against each other well below a hertz, which you feel more than hear.
Both panes close: the × on the controls or on an object’s card, or Escape — which closes the card first, then the controls. ☰ Controls at the bottom left brings the panel back, and it remembers whether you left it open.
Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom, right-drag (or two fingers) to pan. Click a body to select it. §01 Time runs the clock — play it, scrub the year, or set the speed. Orbits are real Kepler ellipses, so the planets bunch and spread exactly as they should.
§03 rides a spacecraft along its actual trajectory. The camera follows a smooth arc-length path, so travel is at a steady speed rather than lurching between waypoints.
It also calls out what you pass. The missions carry their real encounter lists, so Voyager 2 going by Uranus says 1986 — the year it actually happened — while a planet that merely happens to be nearby is announced as just on the way. The threshold scales with your distance from the Sun, so it works at Mercury and at Neptune.
Each callout also says where home is and how long a signal would take to reach it — forty-five minutes at Jupiter, four hours at Neptune. That is the number the controllers actually live with: you cannot fly a spacecraft in real time when the answer takes an hour and a half to come back. If something else is within reach it names that too, but only one thing, because a list of everything nearby stops being context and becomes an inventory.
§04 gives you three ways to listen, and they are doing genuinely different jobs:
Onboard — you are riding the craft, so sound reaches you through the
structure. Attitude thrusters puff only when it actually turns; silence means it is holding
steady.
Vacuum — the honest one. Nothing mechanical can reach you across empty space, so
instead you hear the plasma wave line, the real measurement that told us where the solar
wind ends.
Known Space — Niven's universe, and labelled as fiction. Its reactionless
thruster is nearly silent, which is the accurate part.
Underneath all three, the field is quadraphonic and locked to your view: four beacons on the ecliptic, a keel that brightens as you tilt off the plane, and a room that grows as you pull back. Turn until the warm beacon is dead ahead and you are facing sunward.
§05 has no audio files in it. A planet's orbital period is a frequency — far too low to hear, but transpose it up by octaves and it lands in range. Earth's year arrives at 136.1 Hz. Tempo comes from orbital velocity, so Mercury runs at 154 BPM and Neptune at 18, and the motif rhythm is the planet's nearest real resonance: Jupiter against Saturn is 2:5, accurate to under a percent. Kepler wrote it; this only transposes.
Each piece moves through five phases — emergence, gathering, apex, recession, residue — and the sub and the shimmer are held back until the apex, so that when they arrive there is somewhere to have arrived from. The slow pulse underneath is real: two planet tones sounded together beat at their difference, and Uranus against Neptune beats at 4.08 Hz. The long swell is the pair's conjunction cycle.
Share this piece renders 90 seconds offline and hands you a WAV — through the share sheet on a phone, saved as a file otherwise.
You can also load your own audio and video — several at once, with a playlist, loop and shuffle — and then ask the spheres to tune themselves to it. The tempo and key are read off your track and the generated music moves into them.
A .rsperf file from SkySounds is a recorded performance with its tracks still separate. Loading one places each part at its own bearing, so the arrangement ends up around you rather than in front of you — which is the whole reason the studio does not simply hand you a mixdown.
A microphone, a line in, or a Bluetooth source. Bluetooth is not a separate setting: a paired device simply appears in the device list as another input.
The two modes differ in one thing that matters enormously. Microphone keeps echo cancellation, noise suppression and auto gain on — they exist to make speech intelligible in a room. Line in turns all three off, because on music they do real damage: the gate chews holes in quiet passages, auto gain pumps the level, and echo cancellation notches the spectrum. Monitoring starts muted on a microphone, since the speakers are usually pointed at it.
A jump is a burst, not a switch. Nine seconds and it ends itself.
Beacons sit on the ecliptic: the low warm one is sunward. The keel brightens as you tilt off the plane, the room grows with your view in AU, and a selected body pings from its own bearing. Locked to the view — nothing steers it but the camera.