The ceiling of grand central station is beautiful. It was painted in 1913, replaced in the 1930s and refurbished in the 1990s to represent the constellations in the night sky. Except backwards, except for Orion who appears as he would from earth. While human stupidity never ceases to amaze me, I don't think you could paint several hundred feet of prestigious ceiling, with consultants, and no one would notice the entire thing is backwards, then again, I could be wrong. Some people also suggest that it was painted this way as occult symbolism, this also seems unlikely to me. Their are much more reasonable explanations however. It is possible that the artist based his drawing on a faulty Colombian astronomy chart where Orion was drawn backwards, and so when he flipped the entire thing, on purpose, Orion ended up the correct way while everyone else was the way the artist wanted. The artist may have been inspired by renaissance artists who painted the constellations "from above" so that a person got the view the gods would see when looking down from the heavens. The "mistake" was promptly noticed by an amateur astronomer as soon as the mural went up, but as a testament to the artist and history of Grand Central's terminal the art has been left "backwards"
