May 8 1985
From The Space Library
The Smithsonian Institution announced that "Celestial Images: Astronomical Charts, 1500-1900," a special exhibition of 39 rare depictions of star patterns and planetary systems, would open May 16 at its National Museum of American History.
The exhibition, intended to illustrate a unity of science and art from the Renaissance to the 1900s, would include two woodcuts, the first printed star charts with coordinates and scales from which positions of stars could be plotted, from the workshop of Renaissance artist and mathematician Albrecht Durer (1471-1528). The museum would also display from Lahore, India, a 17th-century Islamic celestial globe made of brass and inlaid with silver stars; the only extant copy of engraved paper gores (1599) for the first celestial globe by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638), the first to incorporate the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe's unexcelled positions for 1,000 stars; and a 17th-century celestial atlas by Andreas Cellarius.
In addition to reflecting artistic styles and conventions of their periods, the works represented differing points of scientific and philosophical debate. Charts that accurately fixed many constellations and thousands of stars also depicted Ptolemy's view of the earth as the center of the universe. Constellations rendered as mythological figures in one work might appear as Biblical figures in another. However, as a result of astronomer's access to stronger and technically improved instruments, the works showed increasing accuracy over the 400 years covered in the exhibition. (Smithsonian Institution Release, May 8/85)
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