National Museum of China-Astronomical Tablet | Davinci CG

This project is the canopy at the entrance to the Science and Technology Exhibition in the National Museum of China. The original picture is the bluestone texture of the “Astronomical Map” stele of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the stele is in good condition. The stele is divided into two parts: star map and illustration. According to the “History of the Yuan Dynasty”, the Northern Song Dynasty government organized four star observation activities during the Jingyou, Huangyou, Yuanfeng and Chongning years. This star map was drawn based on observations during the Yuanfeng period (1078~1085).
The star map takes the North Pole as the center and draws three concentric circles of different sizes so that the constellations of the entire celestial sphere are projected on its plane. The small circle represents the Arctic Circle, the middle circle represents the equator, and the large circle represents the visible line in the southern sky. There is another circle representing the ecliptic, its diameter intersects with the equator, and the two circles intersect at an angle of 240 degrees. The vernal equinox is to the upper right of the intersection of the ecliptic and the equator, and the autumnal equinox is to the lower left. There are also two irregular lines in the center, representing the Milky Way. There are also twenty-eight meridians drawn from the small circle to the great circle, dividing the star map into twenty-eight different parts, each part containing one night, for a total of twenty-eight nights (seven nights in the east, west, south, and north). There are 339 stars with names engraved on the twenty-eight constellations, plus the unnamed stars, a total of 1,440 stars.
Based on this, we made post-production animations. At the beginning of the video, we selected elements from the astronomical monuments to display them in a three-dimensional form in the universe, increasing humankind’s pursuit of the vastness of the universe. The use of line drawing animations to display the “four images” further demonstrates the ancient people’s cultural level of combining art and technology.