| The
orrery was a centerpiece of eighteenth-century London coffeehouse lectures.
Lecturers would use it to demonstrate the motions of planets around
the sun, and moons around the planets, explaining phenomena ranging from
comets, eclipses and the phases of the moon to the seasons and day and
night. The perfection of these motions was held to display the perfection
of God himself.
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In
the eighteenth century, the outer planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto
were not yet known to exist (as well as a lot of the minor moons of
the gas giants, and the two moons of Mars).
Our virtual orreries, like real orreries, therefore feature only six planets and some of their major moons. The order of the planets is: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
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