I love this simple wooden orrery from Muji's gift lineup. Sadly, their ecommerce-fu is about as terrible as it gets, but if you're near a Muji store, it's £16 well-spent.
Wooden Solar System (Thanks, Alice!)
Wooden orrery
I love this simple wooden orrery from Muji's gift lineup. Sadly, their ecommerce-fu is about as terrible as it gets, but if you're near a Muji store, it's £16 well-spent.
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Wooden orrery
I love this simple wooden orrery from Muji's gift lineup. Sadly, their ecommerce-fu is about as terrible as it gets, but if you're near a Muji store, it's £16 well-spent. Wooden Solar System (Thanks, Alice!) ... More.
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It's obviously broken. I only see eight planets.
But £8 will only get you half of one...unless they're on special offer soemwhere..?
*checks Cat off Christmas list*
Poor Pluto.
@1: Sorry! Right you are!
Interesting. Eight planets and two have rings. I would love one.
1) "Rotating wooden solar system is the perfect gift for young geography lovers."
Hunh? That'd be "young astronomy lovers".
2) efergus3: Yeah right! TWO planets with rings? Jeepers, what about the other two?
Guilty: "All of the giant planets in our solar system have rings: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter's ring is thin and dark, and cannot be seen from Earth. Saturn's rings are the most magnificent; they are bright, wide, and colorful. Uranus has nine dark rings around it, and Neptune's rings are also dark, but contain a few bright arcs."
Happy?
It's still beautiful and I don't see it on the US Site.
"It turns out that all of the planets, Earth included, did have rings at one time. The thing is, these rings were unstable and the material was either lost to space or collected into the satellites of these planets. The difference between the terrestrial and giant planets is the giant planets have the gravity to capture and hold onto a large satellite system, and these satellite systems are the source of the ring material.
For a ring to be stable, it must be held tightly by the planet's gravity, and the planet must also exert tidal forces on the particles in the ring. Tidal forces result from the fact that the pull of gravity is inversely related to distance, so the farther away an object is, the less force it experiences from the object it is orbiting. Therefore, a planet pulls a little bit more on the inner side of its moons than on the outer side. Close enough to a planet, this might cause a moon to break apart, and also keeps the bits of material that form a ring from collecting together into a moon.
However, it's possible that Mars might develop a ring in the future. Its moon, Phobos, is close enough to the planet that it feels the effects of the planet's tidal forces, and eventually it may break apart and form a ring.
Earth, Mercury, Venus and Pluto will probably never again have observable rings, although if you dumped tons and tons and tons of sand near the planet, it would probably form a ring - pretty cool eh?"
"Poor Pluto."
Et tu, Muji? Et tu?
Let's make a ring around our moon then.
Well, to their credit, the two best remaining ring systems (Saturn's and Uranus') are represented. It is lovely, and I may look into getting one (I have another orrery already, plus some home-made planet models that I use for teaching). The thing is, they never do the Sun on these things to scale.
Something tells me, though, that shipping would be a bitch if they did.
Muji has a whole bunch of awesome stuff we can't get in the US. Greg @ Daddytypes has a traditional annual post highlighting some of the best unobtainable items. I ♥ the North Pole Box.
I want one of these for Hanukkah!
Happy? I will be by the time I'm halfway through this glass of Balvenie.
I am so, so heart-broken. I ordered this for the dear, dear son of some dear, dear friends. He has been really into space lately, so I thought it would be perfect. I imagined we could paint the planets together, maybe. Long story short, only hours after arriving it got completely destroyed by a friend's dog who took the cardboard box out of my backpack, and tore it apart along with everything inside. I decided to bite the bullet and get another one, only to find that they're sold out. Bah. Bah. Bah.
Are these available anywhere else?