Highlights of the Adler Planetarium: Rare Books & Works on Paper

The Adler Planetarium seeks to connect people to the Universe and to each other under the sky we all share. The Rare Book Collection is one of the Adler's best examples that this mission is an extension of humankind's enduring connection to the sky; every culture throughout time has looked up at the stars and worked out their place among them.

These are possibly the earliest printed depictions of the classical Western constellations. They illustrate the first printed version (dated 1482) of "Poeticon Astronomicon", a work about constellations written around the second century AD. 

In 1543, Copernicus published "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). This diagram, taken from the second edition of 1566, illustrates the revolutionary idea presented in the book: contrary to what was generally believed at the time, the Earth does not sit at the center of the Universe. Rather, it orbits the Sun together with the other planets.

In this book from 1627 Johannes Kepler presents a set of tables to predict planetary positions. The frontispiece (illustration opposite the title page) shows Kepler in his studio, at the lower left corner of the temple of astronomy. On his desk sits a model of the temple's dome, signifying that Kepler is completing the work of his predecessors. Note also Kepler's handwriting on the bottom. He signed and dedicated this copy of the book to Benjamin Ursinus. Ursinus had introduced Kepler to a new mathematical tool that he used in the book: logarithms. 

This seventeenth-century book proposes two candidates for the title of the inventor of the telescope: Hans Lipperhey and Saccharias Jannsen. The author, Petro Borel, gives preference to the latter. The telescope seems to have emerged around 1608 in the Dutch city of Middleburg, where both Jannsen and Lipperhey worked as spectacle makers. But it most likely resulted from various contributions, not simply from the effort of a single inventor. 

Johannes Bayer's "Uranometria" -originally published in 1603 - is generally regarded as the first modern star atlas. It presents forty-eight constellations from Antiquity plus twelve "new" constellations identified by European oceanic navigators in the Southern skies. The hand-colored plate shown here depicts the old constellation of Bootes, the Herdsman. 

This book compiles three decades of astronomical observations by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687). Almost all of the original copies were lost during a fire that burned Hevelius’s house to the ground while he and his wife were absent. Fortunately, many of Hevelius’s works and letters were saved by one of his daughters, who threw them out the window during the fire.

This work is "Firmamentum Sobiascianum", likely the most beautiful star atlas ever produced. It combines accurate astronomical measurement with exquisite artistic renditions of the constellations. The author, Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687), was not only an accomplished astronomer and maker of astronomical instruments, but also a skillful draughtsman and engraver.

In this book the British teacher and landscaper Thomas Wright (1711-1786) speculates about the distribution of stars in space and presents different models to explain the Milky Way. William Herschel would later pursue these investigations on the basis of systematic observations, thus helping pave the way to modern galactic astronomy.

Johanne Bode's "Uranographia" (1801) was the last great atlas combining figurative renditions of the constellations with the accurate mapping of the sky. More than 17,000 stars are represented in this work, which also includes a great number of nebulae discovered by William Herschel. Several now obsolete constellations can be found in Uranographia, including Frederick's Glory, Felis the Cat, the Printing Shop, and the Hot Air Balloon.