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.

Even though I hardly placed a piece all weekend, there’s been some progress. The bottom edge is almost done, and the top edge is mostly done. I’ve done most of the spacecraft, satellites and other man-made stuff. I also placed the completed bits more or less where they belong.

The first planet is also almost done:

I picked Uranus because the cyan pieces were the easiest to pick out. The colour comes from methane in the atmosphere of the planet. As you can see, this is not one of the warmer planets, and it takes Uranus 84 Earth years to orbit the sun. Its axis is tilted so that it points almost directly at the sun. More info on Uranus. Uranus has 27 moons (as you can see), but only some of the most well known are pictured in the puzzle. The names are finished, but the small dots representing the moons are still missing.

Most planets, except Earth, are named after Roman gods, but Uranus is just a Latinized form of the Greek god Ouranos (the Roman equivalent would be Caelus), the sky god. He was the grandfather of Zeus/Jupiter.

As for the moons, according to Wikipedia, most of the moons of Uranus are named after characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope.

I am having so much fun with this one, and I enjoy reading about all the celestial bodies.

Also, WordPress just reminded me that’s it’s the third birthday for this blog. I’m sort of impressed that I’ve managed to keep it up for so long, it’s not really like me at all 🙂

Despite work I’ve managed to do some puzzling in the evenings. Going back to the office has actually been easier than expected.

I pulled all the pieces with text first, and I’ve put together most of the words. The remaining texts are all about moon(s), and I’m going to leave that for a while. The word moon appears so many times, and the names of the moons are oriented diagonally, not horizontally, so I’m going to do something else. I’ve now started pulling the edge pieces, I’ll do at least some of the edges next.

And since this is an educational puzzle, I’m definitely learning things. I don’t know why, but somehow I misremembered Mars was bigger than earth, but it’s actually quite a lot smaller. Also, Mars is the only planet in addition to earth where the temperature is tolerable for humans at least some of the time. The minimum temperature is bad (-153C/-243F), but at least the maximum temperature is quite pleasant (20C/68F). The other planets are more like never above -100C/-148F or never below 400C/752F. No wonder that colonization plans usually revolve around Mars. It’s also close, of course, as planets go. I find space travel fascinating, but would never want to go myself, I’m far too fond of my comfortable life.

In case it’s not obvious, I’m really enjoying this puzzle 🙂

I arrived in Helsinki today, and wanted to start a great 5000-piece puzzle that I bought in Germany straight away:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this type of educational puzzle with such a large piece count, and definitely not from Ravensburger. Eurographics has 1000-piece educational puzzles, but otherwise, it’s mostly very small piece counts for children.

I’ve started spreading out the pieces, but I don’t think I’ll be able to finish that today – it’s my least favourite part of puzzling (I don’t sort – that would be even worse).

There were quite a few pieces stuck together, although so far, they’ve all come apart easily enough. The pieces also seem quite thin for Ravensburger.

Tomorrow, I’m going into the office for the first time in ages. Colleagues who have already taken the plunge tell me it’s kind of tiring to interact with other people in person all day, and I’m expecting to be exhausted just putting on clothes and getting out of the house to go to work 🙂 Which is to say, progress may be slow on this puzzle in the near future.