Naishi Min - May 21, 2005

Our speaker for the May general meeting is Naishi Min, who was the director of the Shanghai, China Planetarium from 1958 to 1992. He has directed and produced over 20 planetarium shows for astronomy courses to middle and high schools, universities, and public in China.

Mr. Min will speak on ancient Chinese astronomy, including their traditional constellations and star names, which were devised over 3,000 years ago and are still in use in China. In his slide show, he will show armillaries used in Chinese observational astronomy for over a thousand years. An accomplished artist, he has painted beautiful models of ancient Chinese observatories.

A historian with interest in new ways of visually explaining astronomy, Naishi Min has developed cardboard pop-up models to aid visualization of concepts such as the relationships between equatorial, ecliptic, and horizon coordinate systems. He will show us these, as well as his planispheres, moon-phase predictors, pop-up armillary, and the VeMarsJuSa, a predictor of positions of four naked-eye planets. (Guess which!). He has published over 20 astronomical-themed pop-up books, to go with his other books and publications.