Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Until a few months ago, the largest thing Sarah Spencer, of Melbourne, Australia, had ever knitted was a baby blanket. But she recently decided to scale things up—astronomically. The result is a vast tapestry of the cosmos, 21 times bigger than her blankets.
Spencer is a software engineer by trade, and pulled this project off by tinkering with a domestic knitting machine from the 1980s. She grabbed star data from publicly available maps, and then designed an algorithm that could translate pixels into stitches in one of three different colors. And then, bang! “Yarn is a fuzzy material to work with,” she says, “so it wasn’t a perfect science.”
It might not be up to the engineer’s standards for precision, but it includes all 88 constellations, including Spencer’s favorite, Orion. Visible,…
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