I cannot make out how the stars are shown on this globe. I looked into this a few years ago when I noticed that the star map on a very expensive globe was 'backwards'. I wrote to the company but they did not know what I meant! I don't know why a star globe cannot be made with Sirius to the LEFT of Orion! I don't know why you would need it to be transparent though.!
The Sky & Telescope star globe -- a true masterpiece -- shows stars in the same parity that you do when looking at the night sky. In other words, Sirius is to the lower left of Orion when you hold the globe with Polaris at the top. If you take any small rectangular slice of the globe and magnify it, it looks much like the charts in a conventional atlas.
I would be hard-pressed to say whether that's "frontward" or "backward." When you hold a celestial globe in your hands you're taking the "God's eye" view -- looking at the universe from the outside. Viewed that way, the S&T globe is in fact backwards. God would see Sirius to the lower right of Orion when Polaris is at the top.
Roger Sinnott told me that he did in fact consider producing a God's-eye celestial globe, but couldn't see what purpose it would serve, since no matter how you oriented the globe, it would never match what you actually see looking up from Earth's surface.
If you want a God's-eye globe to be useful, it does need to be transparent, because that way you can see the far side of the globe in "correct" parity, matching what you actually see when you look at the sky. But while that might be useful as a teaching tool, it's way easier to look at an opaque globe with the snail's-eye view. The S&T globe is in fact immensely useful if you want to find out what the sky looks like from alien latitudes.
When you view the far side of a transparent God's-eye globe, you're viewing the surface from the "wrong" side, which reverses the parity, just like looking in a mirror. That's an old trick for using conventional star charts with refractors. Look at the back of the chart, shine your flashlight on the front, and what comes through the paper will match what you see in the scope's eyepiece.
This is intimately related to the fact that on celestial charts east is to the left of north, whereas on terrestrial charts east is to the right of north, a fact that invariably confuses many newbies -- and continues to confuse me as well, even though I understand the reasons perfectly.
