Constellation Map Lamp
Introduction: Constellation Map Lamp
In 2019 for the July Fourth holiday, I went on a camping-climbing trip in Bishop, CA with friends. It was my first time camping and second time climbing outdoors, so I was excited for all the new experiences and activities I got to try. There were earthquakes that weekend, one of which happened on the second pitch of our first time trying a multipitch route.
Those friends have moved away now and with COVID going on, I haven't camped let alone climbed in a while. I was going through my picture albums to reminisce and thought about making something to represent the memories I've had with outdoor climbing. I ended up deciding to do a constellation based lamp. That was one of the major things that hit me when I went camping: the stars were amazingly clear when I looked up, and having always lived urban areas it was a gorgeous view that I'd rarely seen. I opted to sleep in the hammock just so I could have that whole night view in front of me as I slept. I wore my favorite glow-in-the-dark constellation hoodie and at night it would glow beautifully with the stars above.
This final lamp is the shape of a star, with each of 5 panels corresponding to 5 nights related to climbing/camping that are most memorable for me. I isolated constellations from the position of the night sky at those 5 moments and turned them into panels of the lamp, which I 3D printed (I recently purchased my own 3D printer and was itching to have a project to try it out on).
Side note: if you enjoy this tutorial, votes in the Make It Glow Contest would be appreciated
Supplies
* 3D printer and filament
+ I have an Ender 3 and used black and teal PLA
* Software
+ 3D CAD: notable free ones are tinkerCAD and Autodesk Fusion 360, but I'm most familiar with SolidWorks (and have a license from work) so that's what I used
+ Vector drawing: free one is Inkscape, but I have Adobe Illustrator from school so that's what I used
* fairy lights (or other light supply)
Step 1: Generating Star Maps
To find the star maps of specific locations at specific dates and times, I used YourSky. The info you'll need to input to specify the map is:
* Location:
+ The site accepts longitude and latitude coordinates. To find out the coordinates of the location, you can use Google Maps. 492
Search for the place, then right click the upside down marker and click "What's here?". At the bottom, you should now see the coordinates (latitude, longitude). The positive and negative signs refer to north/south and west/east. For latitude, north is positive and south is negative, whereas for longitude positive is east and negative is west. Knowing that, input the coordinates into the appropriate spots and select the corresponding north/south, west/east.
* Date and time
+ You have 3 choices: now, Universal time, and Julian day. Julian day is a classic astronomer's term that I still don't really understand so I opted to use Universal time. The key thing to note that Universal time uses the UTC time zone, so you'll have to convert the time zone for whatever you choose. For example, I wanted 2019 July 4th at 8PM PDT, but UTC is 7 hours ahead so I input 2019 July 4th at 3AM.
Once you input those into the corresponding fields, you can generate a star map. Other things I changed:
* Showing constellations
+ Make sure you have the Outlines box checked under Constellations.
+ Since I mainly needed the constellations, I changed the number in "Show stars brighter than magnitude __" from the default 5.5 down to 4.0. You can play around with this value until you have mostly isolated the constellations
* Color scheme
* For better visibility, I chose white on black background for Colour Scheme instead of the default Colour.
* Image size
* To make the lines bigger to make vector tracing easier, I changed Since I mainly needed the constellations, I changed the number in "Show stars with brightness greater than" from the default 5.5 down to 4.0. You can play around with this value until you have mostly isolated the constellations from the default of 640 pixels to 2000 pixels.
Once I was happy, I right clicked the image and saved it.
Step 2: Things to Note for Your Star Maps
I added the star maps that I ended up generating above for reference of what they look like.
A few extra things to note:
* You can click on the map to get a zoomed-in look at the sky. It also shows the star and constellation names, so it's helpful if you wanted to learn more. 204