The canonical view holds that Eisinga decided to build an orrery in his living room to prove that there was no reason for panic. He expected to finish it within six months and eventually finished it in 1781, seven years after he started. During the same year, Uranus was discovered, but there was no room for this planet on the ceiling of his living room, where the orrery was located. However, recent research indicates that this chain of causality is dubious, not least because Eijsinga appears to have commenced construction "before" the publication of Alta's book. The construction of the orrery saved Eijsinga a lot of time, however, because he no longer needed to calculate the planets' respective positions by hand.