A Beginner's Guide to

Basic Construction and Use

of the Astrolabe
by Meredith Hughes

... by mediacioun of this litel tretys, I purpose to teche the a certein

nombre of conclusions aperteynyng to the same instrument. I seie a
certein of conclusions, for thre causes. The first cause is this: truste wel
that alle the conclusions that han be founde, or ellys possibly might be
founde in so noble an instrument as is an Astrelabie ben unknowe
parfitly to eny mortal man in this regioun, as I suppose. An-other cause
is this, that sothly in any tretis of the Astrelabie that I have seyn there be
somme conclusions that wol not in alle thinges parformen her bihestes;
and somme of hem ben to harde to thy tendir age of ten yeer to conceyve.

-- Geoffrey Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, ca. 1391

Note: All information in this document was imparted to me by Dr. John Heilbron as
supplementary material for his course History 241: The Scientific Revolution, during my
junior year at Yale. Of course, this document reflects my own imperfect memory and
imperfect understanding of the Great Art, so all errors are my own.

Orientation and Materials

About this document: This is intended to be an entirely practical introduction to the
construction and use of the astrolabe. It assumes only the most basic knowledge of
astronomy (i.e., familiarity with the terms "altitude", "azimuth", "right ascension", and
"declination": if you don't know these words, why are you making an astrolabe? Just
kidding -- look them up before starting, at least). There will be very little theory,
although I hope someday to add an appendix with some of the basic theory of
stereographic projections. Don't hold your breath, though.
Enjoy, and please send comments (including suggestions for improvement, or any
errors you might catch) to mhughes@aya.yale.edu
Materials Required: Start simple, but once you get the knack of it, your astrolabe will
be as good as the materials you use.

The basics:
- compass (with pencil/lead)
- protractor
- ruler or straight edge
- pencil
- a good eraser (crucial)
- paper
- clear plastic (e.g. transparency plastic or acetate from an art store)
- Sharpie or other permanent marker for writing on plastic
- tape (optional)

Once you get really into it:

- better clear plastic (if you find the ideal variety, tell me!)
- inking compass
- compass with extendable arm (very helpful for those large-radius
azimuth curves)

Before you begin, you'll also need the following information:

- your latitude
- the positions of the 50 (or however many) brightest stars for whichever
area of the sky your astrolabe will cover (if you live near Boston, for
example, this might include all those stars northward of declination -30).
You can find this information using the Simbad astronomical database.

Introduction to the Astrolabe: Before we start, perhaps we should address the

following question: What exactly is an astrolabe, and why would we want to construct or
use one?

OK, I'll admit it. The astrolabe is slightly obsolete. It was, after all, invented several
thousand years ago. The astrolabe is to astronomy what the slide rule is to
mathematics. It is an analog calculator for solving problems in spherical trigonometry,
which can today be done more quickly and more accurately (since the sphere is but an
approximation to the actual motions of the sun and stars) with computers.

As I hope you'll find, however, the process of constructing and using an astrolabe will
improve your understanding of the motions of the sun and the stars. It will also give you
a very good approximation of their movements, as much as you'll probably ever want to
know for your everyday life. Astrolabes are beautiful. They provide an elegant yet
transparent method of solving problems in spherical trigonometry, using simple
geometric tools you could find in a fourth-grade math classroom.
Back to the concrete:
The astrolabe, as mentioned, is an analog computer for solving problems in spherical
trigonometry. Given an astrolabe with the tympan appropriate to your latitude, I'll
explain how to
- tell the time of night or day by sighting the altitude of a star or the sun
- predict rise, set and transit times of celestial objects
- predict the time and direction (azimuth) of sunrise/sunset for any day
of the year
- calculate the position of any (fixed) celestial object at a given time
This list isn't exhaustive, but if you can do all the things listed above, you'll be off to a
good start.

The astrolabe has three primary parts:

- the tympan (or plate), which is latitude-specific and shows lines of
altitude and azimuth, hours of the day, and the local horizon
- the rete, which goes over the tympan and shows the positions of the
stars and the ecliptic, and may have lines of right ascension and
declination
- the alidade, which serves in dual capacities as an instrument for sighting
altitudes and as a marker for properly aligning and reading the instrument

[tympan] [rete]
A word about stereographic projections:
Stereographic projections were invented by the ancient Greeks. Practically speaking,
all you need to know about them is the following:
When any circle drawn on a sphere is projected onto the equatorial plane of the sphere
by drawing a cone through the circle with its vertex at one pole of the sphere, the
projection of the circle onto the equatorial plane is also a circle (not an ellipse as you
might think!). This has the fortunate implications for would-be astrolabe constructors
that all curves in an astrolabe are circles! Hence the simplicity of the tools required:
nothing but a compass, protractor and straight edge.
If that didn't make sense, take a look at the figure below:
Construction of the Astrolabe
Getting ready to construct:
Clear a work area. A large, smooth table is best. You'll probably want to tape down
your papers to keep them from shifting as you draw with the compass.
Tape down two sheets of paper. One of these will be your "worksheet", on which you
will perform the actual stereographic projections and mark out the appropriate distances
to be transferred onto the tympan and rete of the astrolabe. You will probably want
several worksheets during the making of the astrolabe. The other taped sheet will be
your tympan.
Decide on the size of your celestial equator. This should be much smaller than the size
of the paper. If you're using an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, a good radius is about 2.5". On
your worksheet, draw a circle of this size in the left half of the paper using your
compass. On the tympan, draw it in the center.
Below is the basic layout of the worksheet, shown in three dimensions to illustrate its
relationship to the tympan. The plane of the paper will be the plane of the meridian (HA
= 0h, or az = 0°, 180°). By contrast, the plane of the tympan paper will be the equatorial
plane of the sky. Always reference your worksheet to your tympan using the anchor
point, which will be a single point in the center of the circle on each sheet of paper, as
well as the meridian line, which will always be a straight line passing through the anchor
point.
The tympan:

1) Lines of altitude
Be patient, because this is the hardest part!
Begin by laying out your worksheet in the following way: Draw a horizontal line through
your circle and across the page. Make sure that it cuts the circle exactly in half. This is
the meridian line. Next, using your protractor, draw a line across the circle, though the
center point, at an angle of [90° - your latitude] from the left point of the circle. This is
your horizon line. Draw the perpendicular bisector of the horizon line and mark where it
intersects with the circle. These are your zenith and nadir points.
Now lay your ruler across the page so that it connects one end of the horizon line to the
south celestial pole (SCP). Mark where this line intersects the meridian line (this is very
important! That's why it's starred in the diagram: the left-hand star is this point). Do the
same thing for the other end of the horizon line (starred point #2). When you're finished,
your worksheet should look like this:

Now you are ready to project your horizon onto the tympan.
OK, remember the bit about stereographic projections? Here's the cool part: those two
points marked with stars above are two points on a circle in the equatorial plane, whose
center also lies on the meridian line. Your tympan is the equatorial plane. So how do
you draw the circle? Mark the same points on the meridian line of your tympan, bisect
the distance between them, and you have the center and radius of your circle!
When you transfer the points on the meridian plane to the tympan, make sure to
reference everything to your anchor point. I usually like to draw my meridian line
vertically through the tympan, but just to confuse you, I've drawn it horizontally in the
next picture. It doesn't matter -- pick a direction, bisect the circle on your rete, and that's
your meridian line. Forever. The anchor point is still the center of the circle.
Now, put the projected horizon points on your meridian line, in the appropriate locations
relative to the anchor point. Bisect the distance between them (it's probably less messy
to do this on your worksheet, and it just means one more point to project). Now use
your compass to draw a circle with its center at the bisector, passing through the two
points, like this:

Congratulations! You have just completed your first stereographic projection!

It only gets easier from here on out.
The same basic principle applies to all of the other altitude lines. Using your protractor,
mark the points on the circle that are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80 degrees from
your horizon points (the 90-degree point is your zenith, of course, and should already be
marked). There should be two of each. I recommend projecting one altitude line at a
time onto your tympan.
As before, begin on your worksheet by holding your ruler so that it connects the SCP
with the point of interest on the circle. Mark where this line intersects the meridian line
(equatorial plane). Do the same with the corresponding point on the opposite side.
Transfer these projected points to the meridian line of the tympan, bisect the line
between them, and draw your altitude circle!
Below, I'll include one more example, for good measure (arbitrarily, my eyeballed
estimate of the 20 degree altitude line).
Here is what your worksheet should look like:
And here is what your tympan should look like with the 20 degree altitude line and the
horizon line projected onto it:

Onward!
Once you've projected all of your altitude lines onto your tympan, you're ready to move
on to azimuth lines.

2) Lines of azimuth
For this, you may need to tape a few more sheets of paper adjacent to your tympan
sheet, because the azimuth circles have very large radii, and their centers will probably
be off the bottom of the tympan sheet.
Remember that all circles on a sphere are circles when projected onto the equatorial
plane, so lines of azimuth are circles too, even though that might not be intuitively
obvious.
Lines of azimuth are lines that pass through the zenith and nadir, so they must be
projected as circles which pass through the projected zenith and nadir points on the
equatorial plane. Therefore, the centers of the azimuth circles must be on the line that
is the perpendicular bisector of the line connecting the zenith and nadir points. So a
good place to begin is by drawing this line. Project the zenith and nadir points as you
projected the starred ends of the circles above. Then draw the perpendicular bisector of
the line between them (for help with this, see appendix A if necessary).
The meridian is the line of 0 degrees azimuth. The center of the 10-degree azimuth
circle is found by drawing a line 10-degrees from the meridian line (measured from the
zenith point) and marking where it intersects the perpendicular bisector of the zenith-
nadir meridian line. The general case (for a line of azimuth a degrees) is illustrated
below. I've drawn the entire azimuth circle, just to make it obvious, but you'll probably
only want to draw it between the horizon points on your tympan (since you don't really
care about the azimuth of things below the horizon).

Don't forget to draw azimuth circles with their centers on both sides of the meridian line!
(i.e., the mirror image of the diagram above is also an important line of azimuth.)

3) Hours
There are several interesting ways of drawing lines of time (to account for shorter days
in the winter than in the summer, for example), which I'm not going to go into here. It's
my one concession to the fact that we live in the 21st century: we will do the easy thing
and divide the day into 24 even hours. So mark the outside of the circle into 24 even
divisions (if you use tick marks, the ends of your meridian line should be two of the 24
tick marks). The southern end of the meridian line (the zenith end of the line, not the
nadir end) will be 12 noon. The northern end will be 12 midnight. Time increases
counterclockwise (trust me, there's a reason for this: it's so that we can draw the
constellations as they appear to us, not from a God's-eye view, and have them turn
counterclockwise around the NCP, as they would appear to do outside at night).
Your tympan is now complete!

The rete:
Fear not: the rete is a piece of cake once you know how to do stereographic projections
-- which you'd better have figured out while you were making the tympan!
Begin by taping a new sheet of paper to your work surface. This will be the pencil
version of the rete: when you're finished, you can put the sheet of plastic over it and
trace it with the marker. (Ideally you'd do this with an inking compass, but if you don't
have one, tracing carefully with a permanent marker will do an adequate job.)
1) The positions of the stars
No more offset circles! From now on, we only need to gauge distances from the central
anchor point for different declinations, which are measured from the NCP (well, the
celestial equator, actually, but same thing...), which is directly above the central anchor
point.
Now you'll need that list of bright stars. Once you know your star's right ascension and
declination, you can find its position on the rete in the following way:
First, find the projection of the star's declination onto the equatorial plane. The only
thing that matters here is the distance from the anchor point, since lines of declination
are circles centered on the anchor point. Find the projection of the declination in the
same way that you projected the altitude lines:
Next, prepare your rete sheet of paper: draw a circle in the center the same size as the
basic circles you used on your worksheet and tympan. This is the celestial equator.
Quarter the circle. The four points of intersection with the circle are 0h, 6h, 12h and 18h
right ascension (see below). You can mark off finer intervals of right ascension if you
want to be more accurate (you'll probably want to mark at least two hour intervals).
Keeping the distance from the anchor point the proper distance for your star's
declination, rotate the orientation until it is the proper orientation for your star's right
ascension. Mark the star's position. That's it! You've just put the star in its proper
place. Now do that for all the stars you care to.

2) Projecting the ecliptic onto the rete

The ecliptic is the plane of the solar system. Due to the tilt of the earth's axis with
respect to this plane (a tilt of 23.5 degrees, also known as the obliquity of the earth's
spin axis), the ecliptic appears on the sky as a circle inclined 23.5 degrees to the
celestial equator. Project the ecliptic onto the rete as you've projected every other circle
so far. Here are two more diagrams to help you:
To make those lovely zodiac demarcations, draw lines on the ecliptic where they
intersect a line drawn from the anchor point (not the center of the ecliptic circle) to each
even-hour right ascension mark (0h, 2h, 4h, etc.), thereby dividing the ecliptic into 12
uneven segments (or even segments, as seen from the anchor point). You might notice
that these are the signs of the zodiac, which are the constellations that fall along the
ecliptic. The sun, moon, and planets pass through these constellations as they wander
around the sky, making these the unfortunate constellations used by astrologers in
casting horoscopes.

Basic Use of the Astrolabe:

section 1...