Mapping the Universe - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 62

Fig. 2.14 The painting of constellations by an unknown artist in 1575 on the ceiling of the Sala
del Mappamondo of the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, Italy. Orion the Hunter and Andromeda are
both located to the right of the painting (Reprinted from Sesti 1991 )
The first star charts atlases, commonly showing the 48 constellations, appeared
during the sixteenth century. One of the finest of these was Giovanni Gallucci's
Theatrum Mundi of 1558, in which Gallucci positioned the principal stars within
vigorously drawn pictures of the constellations. Ptolemy's star catalogue remained
as the source for comprehensive star charts throughout the sixteenth century.
No one else had undertaken a new sky survey. But at the end of the century,
two revolutionary changes occurred: Tycho Brahe completely re-measured all of
Ptolemy's star positions with unprecedented accuracy, and the Dutch navigator
Pieter Keyser organized the southern stars into twelve new constellations - the first
additions to the topography of the sky for 2,000 years.
These new southern constellations took the form of exotic animals: the Toucan,
the Bird of Paradise, and the Flying Fish, along with a figure of an Indian. The
star groups first appeared on globes by the Dutch mapmaker Willem Blaeu and
in the atlas Uranometria, published in 1603 by Johann Bayer. Bayer used Brahe's
star catalogue, grading the stars for magnitude. The German-Polish astronomer
Johannes Hevelius added seven more constellations in 1690 in his collection of
charts Uranographia . He grouped the stars between existing constellations into new
constellations.
The arms and insignia of most of the royal houses of Europe were once
used to model new constellations, but they were not accepted by the scientific
world and did not last. John Flamsteed catalogued almost 4,000 stars visible from
the Royal Observatory in Greenwich between 1700 and 1720. The atlas drawn
from Flamsteed's catalogue, elegantly engraved by the artist James Thornhill, was
published after Flamsteed's death. As telescopes became more and more powerful,
astronomers began including more and more stars in their catalogues. Eventually,
scientists agreed upon a total of 88 constellations. The last hand-drawn star maps
were made by Friedrich Argelander in 1863, containing a staggering total of 324,189
stars with no decorative constellation figures.