A vastly scaled-down Lego version of the Earth, orbiting the Sun, with its moon in tow, is oddly beautiful. An orrery of beauty.
An orrery is a clockwork model of the solar system, or of just the sun, Earth, and moon. When combined with Lego, though, it is so much more than that.
This creation, made by Jason Allemann of JK Brickworks, is remarkable, using very few parts, yet creating a very special project.
The model is scaled quite well. Not in size, rather in rotation, with painstaking detail gone into the moon’s relationship with the Earth, and the Earth’s relationship with the sun.
The moon orbits the Earth every 27.33 days in the real world, with this JK Brickworks creation pretty close, coming in at a 28-day orbit. The sun’s rotation completed every 25 days is also very close, with the full orbit of the Earth around the sun (in this case every 375 days), over 97pc accurate.
You can crank the gears manually, or apply a Power Functions M-Motor to do all the hard work if you please, with a full set of build instructions here.
