The Karakoy astrolabe

There is no Karakoy astrolabe. There is a drawing of one in a nineteenth century catalog, copied from a description of an object nobody has seen since, and that is enough of a source for me.

I built it clean first, every arc engraved and every ring true, and photographed it that way. Then I aged it in four passes: a brown film, a green haze in the grooves, the bloom spreading from the joints, and finally the salt and the pitting. You can move between the first and the last on the homepage.

The bright edge along the outer ring is the only thing in the piece I cannot defend from a source. It is there because an object this old that nobody ever touched would be a lie.