Because the yarn is a tonal/variegated blue/grey, I wanted to really have the stars pop so I went with a bright orange glowing bead.

The pattern moves surprisingly quickly, even with the beads. I used a beader tool that I made with jewelry wire (as seen in my short video on my blog) to add the beads as I went. I bought a tube that was suppose to have around 350 beads or so and I used about 2/3 to 3/4 of the tube.

I did come across a point where my stitch markers must have got moved so I had to drop down about 10 rows and add and subtract beads as needed to make the chart correct. If I didn’t make it right, it would be my luck that I would run into my favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and then be too embarrassed to show him because he would know there was a spot that wasn’t right. Better to fix it just in case.

I named this after scientist William Herschel. My favorite episode of The Cosmos is episode 4, A Sky Full of Ghosts. That episode explains it better than I can I think. “The light from the stars travels very fast, faster than anything, but not infinitely fast. It takes time for their light to reach us. For the nearest ones it takes years, for others, centuries. Some stars are so far away it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars get here, they are already dead. For those stars we see only their ghosts. We see their light but their bodies perished long, long ago.”

I love the idea that when we look at the stars, we are looking at the past and that even though some of those stars are gone their light still shines. I think it’s so amazing.

The fourth picture shows Orion’s Belt in the middle of the frame.

I think I’m ready to start Celestarium now as a blanket.