Mapping of the heavens

MAPING OF THE HEAVENS
By Peter Whitefield
Constellations were recorded in the Egyptian Tomb of Sett Ic, 1275 BC, and the ancient Chinese, Mayas, Indians, Greeks, Romans and Babylonians, all charted stars and produced Zodiacs and the infamous Farnese Atlas and Islamic Celestial Globe. Whitefield plots the course of man’s early learning through to today. During the middle ages he describes the imagery and scripts that adorned manuscripts, about the heavens and the frescos, paintings and tapestries that depicted man’s obsessions with the mysteries of the sky. He describes the classic age of star maps from the likes of Galileo, Kepler, Schoner, and Tycho, and the discovery in 1660 of the Copernican system which captured the universe’s true structure. Eighteenth century significantly expanded man’s understanding, when William Herschel discovering Uranus in 1781 and became the first man to enlarge the bounds of the solar system and grasp the true three dimensional form of the universe and map the milky way in 1785.