Celestial atlas

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A celestial atlas is a map over stars and other astronomical objects to be observed by astronomers. In the 16th century and before, books depicting stars and constellations were few and most often showed no similarity to the star patterns to be seen in the night sky. With the amateur astronomer Johann Bayer's Uranometria, published in 1603, this lack was remedied by providing a high quality atlas based on Tycho Brahe's precision measurements of numerous stars. Uranometria was followed by a long tradition of depicting stars on a sky full of paintings representing animals, mythological persons and creatures, and later instruments and tools. In essence, this tradition ended slowly during the 19th century, when fanciful and pittoresque illustrations were replaced for technical drawings containing stars, virtual connection lines between stars and constellation borders, which is the dominant celestial atlas custom today, now that high precision atlases containing houndred of thousands of objects based on automatised computer-storage data. A modern example is Uranometria 2000.0.

[edit] See also

• Uranography