Dürer would have used these same formulas in projecting the sky onto a flat surface as well.īut Dürer wasn’t the only one who made star maps. This was about a decade after the first world maps were printed on flat surfaces – it took advances in mathematical formulas to devise a way to accurately project a round globe on flat paper. What made Dürer’s map even more special was that it was the first that put all the constellations together showing them in relation to each other, and it also included coordinates so they could be found. In each of the four corners of the chart, we see major astronomers who impacted the naming of the stars and constellations, including, it’s interesting to note, Al-Sufi, who was the author, in 984, of the Book of Fixed Stars, and was Arab. Take a look at this chart of the northern hemisphere, and zodiac constellations: Imagines coeli Septentrionales et Meridionales zodiaci Dürer was an artist and amateur astronomer, and his Imagines coeli Septentrionales et Meridionales zodiaci became the first start map to be distributed widely, beyond a small network of scholars, because of the printing press. One of the most famous sets of star charts is a 1515 collaboration between Albrecht Dürer and two scientists and mathematicians at the court of Emperor Maximilian I, Johannes Stabius and Konrad Heinfogel. But though they didn’t have Google, they did have star charts and maps, many of which are absolutely gorgeous. These maps provide an unimaginable clarity of the movements of the heavens that our Tudor night-sky watching friends could only have dreamt of. I use the Google sky map, and follow the Hubble Space Telescope on youtube where they do monthly “this month in the night sky” highlights videos. Many of us have star chart apps on our phone.
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