1. The Earth Is Round (1210-1230)
This illumination by the prolific medieval visionary writer, composer, and proto-feminist Hildegard von Bingen depicts the four seasons of a spherical Earth. Although this particular version was produced after her death in 1179, the illustration is thought to follow her original design.
Knowledge of the spherical Earth dates back to the Greek philosophers of about the sixth century B.C., with Pythagoras said to have been among the first to describe it. By the eighth century A.D. and the early medieval period, the shape of the planet was well established.
This is one of the most dramatic early representations of a spherical Earth, from Hildegard's last masterpiece, Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works).
STATE LIBRARY OF LUCCA; COURTESY THE U. LIBRARY, GHENT
2. City Earth (1410-1500)
This unusual 15th century depiction of the Earth as a weightless sphere studded with city spires possesses a proto-sci-fi quality. It was taken from a French translation of the 1240 encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) by Bartholomeus Anglicus (Bartholomew of England).'
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF FRANCE; COURTESY OF THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY
3. Around the Sun (1850)
Depiction of the annual revolution of the Earth around the sun, by H. Nicollet, in the Atlas classique et universel de geographie ancienne et moderne (Classic and Universal Atlas of Ancient and Modern Geography). Seasonal changes can clearly be seen, with the northern polar region exposed to sunlight in summer but shaded in winter. Notice the Copernican scheme, in which the Earth revolves around the sun.
COURTESY THE DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAPS COLLECTION
4. The Square and Stationary Earth (1893)
In this broadsheet bulletin from Hot Springs, S.D., Professor Orlando Ferguson attempts to refute the "globe theory," proposing instead a kind of four-cornered, roulette-wheel world. Note the sun, moon, and north star all suspended on wands projecting from the pole. Strangely, Ferguson's cosmology didn't catch on.
COURTESY THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION WASHINGTON, D.C.
5. Painted Moon (1874)
One of the most interesting early attempts to visualize the moon came with the 1874 publication of a heavily illustrated book titled The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, coauthored by Scottish inventor-engineer and amateur astronomer James Nasmyth and British astronomer James Carpenter. Nasmyth, who had made his fortune with the invention of the steam hammer and the hydraulic press, spared no expense: The lavish book featured several kinds of illustrations, including the superb "lossless" woodburytype photographic reproduction process. Nasmyth even built elaborate plaster models of sections of the lunar surface, which he photographed in raking light in controlled studio conditions.
Nasmyth also made his own hand-drawn illustrations, like the one seen above, including a depiction of an eclipse of the sun by the Earth as seen from the moon, which was converted to a lithograph for the book.
COURTESY THE WOLBACH LIBRARY, HARVARD
6. Sun Dogs (1547-1552)
Very bright sun dogs can sometimes make it seem that the sun has been divided into three. In his treatise on meteorology, Aristotle wrote of a phenomenon in which "two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day until sunset." But this painting from the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch stands in a class of its own, and could just as well depict the view from a planet orbiting multiple stars. The text reads: "In 1533, three suns shone simultaneously and equally strong, as if they had fiery clouds around themselves, and they stood over the city of Münster, as if the city and the houses were burning, as painted here."
COURTESY DAY & FABER
7. Psychedelic Moon (1977)
The west side of the moon is dominated by the giant multi-ringed impact scar of the Orientale basin, which measures more than 600 miles across. On the upper right, in shades of scarlet, is the giant Oceanus Procellarum, the largest of the lunar maria (so large that it is not a mare, or sea, but rather an "ocean"-the only one on the moon, albeit bone-dry).
In this geological map, blue signifies ridges and grooves radial to the Orientale impact, while red is flatter volcanic material.
COURTESY USGS/NASA; MAP BY DAVID SCOTT, JOHN MCCAULEY, AND MARETA WEST
8. Supercomputer Sunspot Simulation (2009)
In this striking image by researcher Matthias Rempel and collaborators, the complex filaments that flow between a sunspot's dark center and lighter outer region have been produced in exquisite detail by simulating the magnetic forces at play using a supercomputer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This image, effectively a still culled from the first comprehensive 3-D model of a sunspot, was created after NCAR received an IBM supercomputer capable of performing 76 trillion calculations per second.
COURTESY NCAR-WYOMING SUPERCOMPUTING FACILITY © UCAR, IMAGE COURTESY MATTHIAS REMPEL, NCAR
9. Comets in Flight (1668)
One of two important seventeenth-century works on comets, Polish astronomer Stanislaw Lubieniecki's densely illustrated book Theatrum cometicum (Theater of Comets) records more than four hundred, from the Old Testament to the late seventeenth century. Here, the trajectory of the Comet of 1664-65 takes it right through the open jaws of the sea monster Cetus (representing the constellation of the same name) and across the ecliptic. That comet, the brightest in more than 40 years, renewed the focus of European astronomers on the phenomenon, reopening questions concerning their orbits, origins, and nature. Even at this time, in the 1600s, some astronomers still stuck to the Aristotelian position that comets were terrestrial atmospheric phenomena.
COURTESY THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF POLAND
10. The Whole Universe (2013)
The structure of the universe at exceedingly large scales can be seen in this still from the Hayden Planetarium show Dark Universe, directed by Carter Emmart. Here galaxy clusters are arranged along weblike filaments of dark matter that extend between nodes of particularly high mass concentrations. The bright knots represent clusters of thousands of galaxies. Vast voids can also be seen between the denser areas.
The diameter represented here is about four hundred megaparsecs. With a parsec constituting 3.26 million light-years, that's more than 1.3 billion light-years across.
COURTESY AMNH-HAYDEN PLANETARIUM, FROM DARK UNIVERSE, DIRECTED BY CARTER EMMART, PRODUCED BY VIVIAN TRAKINSKI
11. Cosmigraphs
Cosmigraphics was released in hardcover on October 14.
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