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The ancient cosmology of Ptolemy placed an unmoving Earth at the center of the Universe, with the heavenly bodies tracing their paths on crystal spheres enclosing the Earth. That called for some pretty exotic mathematics to describe the complicated paths of the visible planets through the sky. But it turns out that it also produced a thing of rare beauty.
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This Starry Night image, made as if the Earth were the center of the Universe, shows the paths of Venus and the Sun over a period of seven years from January 1, 2001, to January 1, 2008. The path of Venus doesn’t quite match perfectly — that is, it isn’t quite a perfect closed loop — but it is remarkably beautiful.
