Over The Years,

many scholars and scientist have looked to the stars,

 and now in one book many of their observations are brought together, the book is by Michael Denson, titled Cosmigraphics, Picturing Space Through Time, and no I am not on commission, I just think this is a fascinating book,

there are so many illustrations in it, I have picked just a few, like this plate from Thomas Wright’s 1750 treatise ‘An Original Theory,’ depicting Wright’s trailblazing notion that the universe is composed of multiple galaxies, courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard, it is amazing that some of these early astronomers with their out of the world theories were not burnt at the stake!

not only are installations feature, but also objects like the Nebra Sky Disc (2000–1600 B.C.), excavated illegally in Germany in 1999, is considered to be both humanity’s first-known portable astronomical instrument and the oldest-known visual depiction of celestial objects, and is almost worthy of a book for itself,

 a 1493 woodcut by German physician and cartographer Hartmann Schedel, depicting the seventh day, or Sabbath, when God rested, courtesy of the Huntington Library,

De Holanda was fascinated by the geometry of the cosmos, particularly the triangular form and its interplay with the circle, courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España,

and here is another surprising illustration by English physician and cosmologist Robert Fludd, long before the notion of vacuum existed in cosmology, he captured the concept of non-space in his 1617 creation series, which depicts multiple chaotic fires subsiding until a central starlike structure becomes visible amid concentric rings of smoke and debris, even though Fludd believed in a geocentric cosmology, this image comes strikingly close to current theories of solar system formation, courtesy of U. of Oklahoma History of Science collections, so the next time you look to the heavens, have a thought for the many early pioneers of what we today take for granted.