Gastro-Astronomical Tableware

[Image: Locating your own constellations for My Private Sky; via dezeen].

dezeen‘s got the goods on a new line of plateware that brings astronomy to your dinner table:

Called My Private Sky, the plates combine computer technology and traditional craft techniques: the designers ask customers where and when they were born, and then use a specially written computer programme to generate the precise arrangement of stars and planets as they would have appeared at that particular time and place.

The designers in question here are Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar, aka Kram/Weisshaar.

[Image: Painting the plates of My Private Sky; via dezeen].

If I can be permitted a fairly self-indulgent side-note, meanwhile, this is actually similar to something my wife and I did for our wedding invitation. Since we got married in London – and since we’re so romantic we make fire retardants burn – we had the Royal Observatory at Greenwich generate a star-map (free of charge!) showing what the skies would look like at 10pm on the evening of our wedding (see an incredibly blurry photograph of said invitation here), with the effect that, once the party was over and you were falling down drunk, you could crawl outside onto the gravel path and look up… awed by the sight of a whole sky’s worth of stars exactly as it appeared on the wedding invitation.
I don’t think anyone actually did this – minus the falling down part – but hey.

[Image: Sample plate designs for My Private Sky; via dezeen].

We later learned that there is a similar sort of star-map embedded in the concrete at Hoover Dam.
In any case, read more about My Private Sky at dezeen.