A Gift to Myself-an Astrolabe!

What the heck is an astrolabe?
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That's what I wanted to know. 

​For my Archeology Art series, I created a painting entitled The Ba'al of Motya. It is inspired by an ancient Phoenician temple complex on the tiny island of Motya, off the coast of Sicily.

The painting is an enchanting combination of the archeological site as it is today, along with references to the wonder of the spiritual environment it once embodied. 

Archeologists found a temple complex oriented toward significant constellations and planets. They found remnants of a statue of Ba'al, a god widely venerated in the ancient Mediterranean world.

At the center of the site lies a shallow pool, believed to have been used to reflect the night sky—an element which was paramount to  this seafaring culture.

There is a lot going on in this piece, and some of the aspects of it, such as the lay out of the temple complex, are depicted in ghostly white lines. To read more about this piece, go to my blog entry about it, HERE.
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​If you look closely at the lower left of the painting, there is a diagonal feature in pale white line. 

This was found by archeologists among the ruins. It is a small, brass pointy-thing.

This, I learned was an alidade, which is a part of a navigation and timekeeping device called an Astrolabe.

How long astrolabes have been in use, and what forms they have taken over the millennia is not clear. Most surviving astrolabes are from the medieval and renaissance eras, which is interesting, because the temple complex on Motya is much, much, much earlier, like about 1500 years earlier. 
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Here is an astrolabe made in 1574 CE, now housed in the British Museum. 

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A Gift to Myself

​And now here is MY astrolabe!

I bought it from Wavytail, "maker of Astronomical, Mid-Century & Aviation Goodies."  It's made of laser-cut wood, with a clear, acrylic rete. 
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Let me be absolutely clear: I have no idea how to use this thing. 

I have always struggled with ciphering, numbers and complex instructions. I even have a learning disability called dyscalculia! But, the way my special mind works (remember the crazy timeline project? What about my new, old typewriter?) is that I enjoy learning most by jumping into things and messing around, sort of like a child playing in a ball pit. 
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The Night Sky

Many of my paintings include depictions of the night sky. Sometimes I look up, and I realize ​I know nothing about it at all. 

My hope is that by playing with my astrolabe, I will get a different sense of what it means to be in this world, stuck on this planet as it whirls and hurtles through infinite space.