stargazing

[melannen]

This has been an utterly gorgeous summer so far. Sometimes I really love Maryland, herself. The weather's had just enough hot days to make me feel welcome without making me pass out from heat exhaustion, and - the best part - I have zero mosquito bites so far!

Tonight, on the drive home, it had rained, and mist was rising up from the roads and the creek. I put my brights on as I went through the twisty lane that follows the creek bottom just so the ghosty swirls would have more substance. Now, outside, it's raining again in the dark; and bright orange lightning against the sky. Plus, there were bagpipers playing on my walk to the car.

...no, actually I don't know what the bagpipes had to do with anything, either. Except that I seem to really like bagpipe music now. It makes my subconscious say "you're at the Renfest! Yay!" (Much the same way rainy summer evenings signal camping trips to me, actually.)

Speaking of Renfest, my conversation with melsmarsh about garb inspired me to pull out a sewing project last night. I need some sort of low-key handwork to keep my mind occupied during my long summer classes, and I remembered that I had bought some Folkwear peasant blouse patterns on the cheap last summer. The one that I really want to make is the Ukranian shirt, and that one suggests a large, heavily embroidered placket down the front. Embroidery is a *good* handwork project for me: takes just enough attention that my mind doesn't wander, without taking *too* much attention. But the suggested embroidery pattern is big huge roses, and I *hate* designs of big huge roses. Irrationally. Possibly partly because my mother loves them, but also, they're ugly. SO! A chance to design an ethnic-looking embroidery pattern!

I want to do Earth's Stargate address. (Actually, I want to do two of these shirts; the first one, with the Stargate address, in plain muslin, to see if I like it, because I can never have to many cream muslin peasant shirts. If I do, I have this wonderful, soft, slate gray wool that I could sew another, more formal one in; that one, I would just do minimal embroidery: just plain black, the runes Sifl, Simn, Pirr, and Ges at the collar and cuffs; but that would be for later; I really don't want to mess up that fabric.)

So. Earth's stargate address. Auriga, Cetus, Centaurus, Cancer, Scutum, Eridanus (and At). It's really astonishing sometimes how very verbal my memory is - I've tried and failed to memorize gate addresses before, but the minute I match the symbols with *names*, I had it memorized in about ten seconds flat. Even though I didn'thave images in my head of what either the symbols or constellations looked like, add names, and suddenly I could draw it for you. Which is honestly kind of odd, because I can pick up alphabets pretty quickly too - but for gate symbols I had no kind of meaning at all to work with, not even sounds, until I started making them into constellations.

Although. Now that I've done that. The gate symbols don't actually look like the constellations! Okay, some of 'em do - Auriga, Cetus, Cancer, and Eridanus I can make to match up, sort of. Centaurus and Scutum, not so much. And since I'd like to make the embroidery pattern be something *wearable*, rather than just 'oh look, she's made a mess with her embroidery silks again', I was thinking of trying to base the design on the constellations as much as the glyphs. But not if I can't get the glyphs to match the constellations. I asked for help on stargate_search and got a resounding no idea. So. Flist. Can you map the Centaurus glyph to the Centaurus stars?

And while I'm at it, what does the Earth Point-of-Origin represent, anyway?

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

earth point of origin is the sun over a pyramid

[melannen.livejournal.com]

See. That's what Daniel said in the movie. But. In Stargate, we're supposed to accept that all the pyramids were built by Goa'uld. So when the Ancients were designing the Stargates there wouldn't have been any pyramids, so it can't have originally been the sun over a pyramid. So Daniel must have been wrong. Right?

[beccaelizabeth]

No, the Ancients' gate was in Antarctica, and their point of origin was a circle over a straight line (Solitudes)

[melannen.livejournal.com]

But surely *both* the Earth gates pre-date the Goa'uld invasion; the refugee Atlanteans would hardly have built a new one just for Ra to use, would they? Not to mention that any Gates made in that period would probably have included Atlantis-level tech.

Unless Ra brought that one with him from some other planet. In which case the triangle-and-circle PoO wouldn't have originally been Earth's at all. I'm going to start confusing myself again.

[beccaelizabeth]

*shrugs*

if you like it better, you could call it a perspective shot of a road leaving up to a Stargate

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Actually I hadn't thought of looking at it that way - I was stuck with the moon over a mountain, or something. But with the associations of the Ancients as roadbuilders, that would make a lot of sense. Plus, with Eridanus the winding path and Auriga the charioteer in Earth's address, that's a lot of road symbolism already...

[beccaelizabeth]

http://beccaelizabeth.livejournal.com/614780.html
has Centaurus and Scutum mapping glyph to constellation

have more like these, don't know where from, can post the rest if you want

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Ooh yay! I figured someone must have done it somewhere! (And I never would have figured out Centaurus on my own.) The rest of them would be interesting - do you have the original filenames you could run a search on to find the source?

[beccaelizabeth]

they were called 'centaurus' etc
which I searched, but found too many to find it

[melsmarsh.livejournal.com]

Very nice shirt. You better show us the Ukranian shirt when you are done!

[melannen.livejournal.com]

If I ever actually finish it, I will!