The Orrery
…you enter the first exhibition room, which is very large and flooded by sunlight broken up into pale pastel colors. Sparkling motes of dust are floating in the misty air; they look like tiny, glittering gold flakes whenever the sun touches them.
Turning your head upwards, you can’t help but marvel at the enormously high, dome-shaped ceiling. The milky pastel light seems to come from its frosted glass, and the dome is supported by thin, golden arches which frequently cross each other, creating beautiful geometric shapes.
But the ceiling itself is not the most remarkable sight in this room: This would be, of course – the exhibit.
Right in front of you, a giant orrery stretches out across a large hall, its countless metal arms and gears whirring and clicking rhythmically. The orrery base is comprised of numerous large discs which are covered by silver engravings of what seems to be astronomy-related nomenclature, constantly turning in different paces and making deep, rumbling sounds while doing so. On its base are several complex sets of bars, all of them carrying spheres which represent the celestial bodies. You can hardly contain your amazement of this miraculous wonder of craftsmanship, as the orrery does not only seem to display a single solar system, but numerous ones; countless globes in all sizes and of different materials speed past you with swishing noises, their surfaces golden, copper, silver, cobalt-blue, brass; you think you can make out a large globe of a dull leaden color in the back which appears to be covered in mathematical equations; and you make out inlays of a tiffany glass mosaic on another one, a smooth, polished sphere in onyxian black, just as it happens to swoosh past you. All of them are shining and glistening in the hazy sunlight, none looking like another, all of them unique in their intricacy.
Your guide droid politely waits in silence for a short while, until your first wave of wonder has passed. It then rolls a bit closer to you, and begins to explain. …