Asterism

Asterism is a sculpture depicting the stars of the Big Dipper as they actually appear in three dimensional space. When viewed head-on from the front, they align to form the familiar pattern we see here on earth, but as the viewer walks around the sculpture and changes his or her viewing angle, they appear to dissolve into a seemingly random, arbitrary configuration.

The 2D (x,y) coordinates were first taken from an image of the Big Dipper, which were then plotted as 3D points in Geogebra with their distances from earth as their z-coordinates. A cube was then drawn around the points, then line segments drawn connecting different legs of the cube so that they passed through the center of the points in order to anchor them to the frame.