This interesting photograph shows the construction of the Southern Star ferris wheel in Melbourne, Australia. Our interest is in the (slightly imperfect) five point star. If we begin with a vertex of a regular pentagon, and connect every second vertex with a straight line segment, we obtain a perfect five point star or pentagram. We can do this without lifting pen from paper. You might investigate what happens starting with other regular polygons. The pentagram has associations with early Christianity, Freemasonry, and magic. Pentagrams also occur as the faces of very attractive three dimensional regular, but non-convex, solids.
