This is an 'artistic impression' of the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera Mechanism is an orrery of some sort, thought to be created by the Ancient Greeks around the year 83 B.C.
The mechanism was on a ship that sunk near the coast of Antikythera, a Greek island. The wreck was discovered in 1900, almost 2000 year later.
Enough of the mechanism survived to know its purpose which was to emulate the positions of the sun and the moon and possibly all the known planets, all by turning one lever.
X-Ray scanning of the object revealed a complex set of gears and even a true differential, the first known to mankind. Note that the original would have looked nothing like this version (it was actually encased in wood).
The trickiest part of modeling the mechanism was finding out exactly which gear goes where but I finally managed to get the gears to fit together perfectly. Perhaps I'll make a short animation of it turning in a few weeks.
I made this image both for fun and for practice. I really learned a lot from the research I did for this, not only about different surface properties and lighting but also more about the Ancient Greek culture.
The mechanism was modeled in 3ds max 7 and rendered in finalRender Stage-1 (from the edu Turbo Toolkit). After that a lot of work went into post work using Photoshop and HDR Shop. For the modeling I also used PolySpeed Beta and PolyBoost.
The back side:

Additional images:
- Back side large
- Scene setup
Links:
- Wikipedia: The Antikythera Mechanism (Google has lots more!)
- PolySpeed
- PolyBoost
Hope you like it, and spare me no critique!
And thanks to the cookie glomping, smiley making people from the CG Society!