
The stellated octahedron is also the general shape of the 'Ghost' drone found in the video game Destiny. The resemblance between this shape and the two-dimensional star of David has also been frequently noted. However, the word 'merkaba' is actually Hebrew, and more properly refers to a chariot in the visions of Ezekiel. Some modern mystics have associated this shape with the 'merkaba', which according to them is a 'counter-rotating energy field' named from an ancient Egyptian word. Escher's print 'Stars', and provides the central form in Escher's Double Planetoid (1949). The stellated octahedron appears with several other polyhedra and polyhedral compounds in M. (sequence A007588 in the OEIS) In popular culture Īs a spherical tiling, the combined edges in the compound of two tetrahedra form a rhombic dodecahedron. The stella octangula numbers are figurate numbers that count the number of balls that can be arranged into the shape of a stellated octahedron. The same twelve tetrahedron vertices also form the points of Reye's configuration.

These two tetrahedra can be completed to a desmic system of three tetrahedra, where the third tetrahedron has as its four vertices the three crossing points at infinity and the centroid of the two finite tetrahedra. One of these two crossings is visible in the stellated octahedron the other crossing occurs at a point at infinity of the projective space, between two parallel edges of the two tetrahedra. The two tetrahedra of the compound view of the stellated octahedron are 'desmic', meaning that (when interpreted as a line in projective space) each edge of one tetrahedron crosses two opposite edges of the other tetrahedron. The stellated octahedron is the first iteration of the 3D analogue of a Koch snowflake.Ī compound of two spherical tetrahedra can be constructed, as illustrated.

It is the simplest of five regular polyhedral compounds, and the only regular compound of two tetrahedra. It was depicted in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione, 1509. It is also called the stella octangula (Latin for 'eight-pointed star'), a name given to it by Johannes Kepler in 1609, though it was known to earlier geometers. The stellated octahedron is the only stellation of the octahedron. Seen as a compound of two regular tetrahedra (red and yellow) (Redirected from Star Tetrahedron) Stellated octahedron
