All of the planets are now more or less complete, only some darker bits of Saturn and Venus are still missing. Even better, the planets are all connected to each other! Only some nebulae and spacecraft are still floating around on their own. There are no more celestial bodies or man-made contraptions left to do, now it’s all just filling in the areas in between. When I look at the puzzle, I think I’m almost done, but then I look at all the pieces I still have left, and there’s at least 1500 pieces there. This happens to me with every large puzzle, at some point I think that the pieces I have left can’t possibly all fit in to the puzzle 🙂

I’m still loving this puzzle. The sun is finished, and Saturn is well on its way. I think I’ll do Jupiter next. Although the three biggest celestial bodies are all yellow, the sun pieces were easy to pick out, and mostly, I can also tell the difference between pieces of Saturn and pieces of Jupiter. Jupiter is next, I think.

In Roman mythology, Saturnus is the father of Jupiter. The Greek equivalent is Kronos, father of Zeus, and the planet was already known as Saturnus in ancient Rome. Somehow I never realized before that the habit of naming planets by Graeco-Roman deities actually goes back to ancient Greece. In China, the planets were named by elements, for example Mercury is the star of water, Mars the star of fire and Jupiter the star of wood. More about Chinese planet names.

Quite a lot of progress on many fronts. Of the planets, I’ve worked on Neptune, Venus, Mercury, and Earth. Many of the nebulae and the man-made stuff have also grown a bit.

Earth, Moon and Mercury.

Mercury is named after the Roman god Mercurius (Greek Hermes, god of commerce and messenger of the gods), and it is of course the smallest planet in our solar system. It was actually called Hermes by ancient Greek scientists, and later Mercurius by the Romans, because they noticed how fast the planet moves. Because the orbit of Mercury is more elliptical than that of any other planet, it is at some points very close to the sun, and at others very far from the sun, causing the temperature to vary wildly from -173C / -280F to 427C / 800F. It takes Mercury 88 days to orbit the sun.

There is currently a mission to gather more information about Mercury underway. The spacecraft was launched in 2018, and it did its first flyby of Mercury on October 1, 2021.

Still some work left on Venus:

The Dumbell Nebula and the Cassini spacecraft:

The Dumbell nebula represents the last stage of evolution of a star and is a glowing shell of ionized gas. In time, it’s expected that the sun will also become such a nebula.

The Cassini spacecraft was used in a mission to gather information about Saturn. It was launched in 1997, and after being active for almost 20 years, it was intentionally destroyed in 2017. The mission was a huge success and provided material for years of research.

The International Space Station was launched in 1998. It is in orbit around earth, and there are 7 crew members on board. Each crew member usually stays for about 6 months.