Many of us have star chart apps on our phone. 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. These maps provide an unimaginable clarity of the movements of the heavens that our Tudor night-sky watching friends could only have dreamt of. But though they didn’t have Google, they did have star charts and maps, many of which are absolutely gorgeous.
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. 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.
Take a look at this chart of the northern hemisphere, and zodiac constellations:
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.
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. 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. Dürer would have used these same formulas in projecting the sky onto a flat surface as well.
But Dürer wasn’t the only one who made star maps. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the libraries of Europe were flooded with Arab texts that had long been lost, including many Greek and Roman writings on astronomy. In homage to the earlier scientists, the contemporary astronomers kept the Roman names, or named stars in a Greek or Roman fashion.
(Fun fact: the Greek word for star was aster. So an asterisk * means a little star. Any words that have a beginning like astro come from that Greek star – asteroid, astronomy, astrology, astrophysics.)
But some Christians were uncomfortable with the pagan names, and created maps showing Christian leaders, like this one from the early 1600’s.
Another leading star chart artist was Andreas Cellarius, a Dutch astronomer and artist, who created this map showing the Copernican system, which, by this point, had become pretty much accepted.
And look at this chart that Cellarius created superimposing the constellations on a globe, giving the impression that you are actually in space, looking at earth, and the constellations around earth.
These early start charts are gorgeous representations of the way science and art sometimes converge to convey subjects that are too big for our human minds to comprehend, in a way that we can begin to wrap our brains around.
Learn more:
Renaissance English History Podcast Episode 84: Looking up at the Night Sky in Tudor England
Or you can have one of these star charts as a puzzle – available in the TudorFair.com shop! https://tudorfair.com/products/andreas-cellarius-copernican-star-chart
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.