Fake Science Images
Source: Serafini, Luigi. Codex Seraphinianus. Milan: Rizzoli. 2013. Print.
Real Science Images
Source: Benson, Michael. Cosmigraphics. New York: Abrams, 2014. Print.
Goals for Student Understanding
The key idea in my ImagineIT is that when learning physical science, one is learning a language. So many science students are turned off, discouraged or bored to tears by the vocabulary and symbols necessary to “speak science,” that they either never see or lose track of the inherent beauty, mystery and fun of learning about why the natural world is what it is and does what it does. If the goal of chemistry is to tell the truth about what exists right here right now and guess where it came from or what it might turn into, then the extremely large variety of substances and energy forms in the observable universe dictate that there must be a lot of names (formulas) to describe the contents of this universe. Without this specificity about matter’s composition the diversity of its forms would be lost to human understanding.
The most essential of these formulas, names and symbols required to participate in the science of chemistry are the building blocks of matter themselves - the atomic symbols of the elements; the abbreviations used to communicate measurement - the SI units and several of the most basic mathematical symbols - plus, minus, multiply, divide, equal sign, percent, logarithms, etc. Acquiring true understanding of these three essential chemical content areas is very much analogous to a foreign language student learning the alphabet of the desired new language, before being able to express words, sentences, ideas or ultimately engage in natural conversation. Once these areas have been sufficiently mastered, the fun of putting them together to describe natural phenomena can begin. If proficiency is never reached, there will always be fundamental confusion in this conversation about why the natural world is what it is and does what it does.
The obvious but necessary starting point with learning these three essential areas of chemistry content is to memorize their definitions/meaning. Fortunately, the world around us has some extremely exciting and often confusing repeatable events that can grow students’ motivation to forge ahead with the often times tedious task of learning the translations of scientific symbols and formulas.
In my experience, of the three major stumbling blocks of essential curriculum for an introductory chemistry class, it is the combination of the element symbols with the math symbols used to show charge once these atoms have been ionized that presents the biggest challenge for learners. In this project I will attempt to use a motivational approach centered upon marrying students’ developing birds eye view of science with historical examples of how, when and where scientists have screwed up, in the hopes of disabusing students of the common misconception that science is set in stone because everything has already been figured out by now. To ease the pain of memorizing these required common ions that are so often the actors in the universal chemical spectacle, I also hope to construct a meaningful new mobile experience that will provide the necessary repetition with significantly less drudgery than the typical flashcard.
The most essential of these formulas, names and symbols required to participate in the science of chemistry are the building blocks of matter themselves - the atomic symbols of the elements; the abbreviations used to communicate measurement - the SI units and several of the most basic mathematical symbols - plus, minus, multiply, divide, equal sign, percent, logarithms, etc. Acquiring true understanding of these three essential chemical content areas is very much analogous to a foreign language student learning the alphabet of the desired new language, before being able to express words, sentences, ideas or ultimately engage in natural conversation. Once these areas have been sufficiently mastered, the fun of putting them together to describe natural phenomena can begin. If proficiency is never reached, there will always be fundamental confusion in this conversation about why the natural world is what it is and does what it does.
The obvious but necessary starting point with learning these three essential areas of chemistry content is to memorize their definitions/meaning. Fortunately, the world around us has some extremely exciting and often confusing repeatable events that can grow students’ motivation to forge ahead with the often times tedious task of learning the translations of scientific symbols and formulas.
In my experience, of the three major stumbling blocks of essential curriculum for an introductory chemistry class, it is the combination of the element symbols with the math symbols used to show charge once these atoms have been ionized that presents the biggest challenge for learners. In this project I will attempt to use a motivational approach centered upon marrying students’ developing birds eye view of science with historical examples of how, when and where scientists have screwed up, in the hopes of disabusing students of the common misconception that science is set in stone because everything has already been figured out by now. To ease the pain of memorizing these required common ions that are so often the actors in the universal chemical spectacle, I also hope to construct a meaningful new mobile experience that will provide the necessary repetition with significantly less drudgery than the typical flashcard.
Evidence of Student Understanding
A selection of performance tasks associated with my ImagineIT project are listed below. Formative assessments will have group discussion, review and sometimes digital or classroom posting opportunities built in. More formal assessments will be reviewed by instructor and student only initially, but then opened up for review with other classmates and faculty after grading is complete. In crafting practice problems and assessment questions, careful effort will be placed on incorporating real world, relevant, current, exciting, mysterious, and/or shocking scientific statistics or applications.
- Interpret, analyze, compare and discuss various real vs. fake scientific images from different countries and different time periods.
- Conduct independent research to locate a scientific image and produce a poster of it combining image with student analysis of that image.
- Create scientific images with proper use of symbols and text to represent data from class investigations
- Summarize, analyze and discuss scientific images and symbols from textbook in notes.
- Create individual pneumonic devices to help learn required vocab and share them with class via video posts.
- Use SI units properly in conversion examples from artist Chris Jordan’s website, both in teacher written and student generated problems. (Example: How many cigarette butts were discarded in the United States in 2013? http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#cig-butts)
- Present SI unit conversion problem of personally relevant statistics discovered through independent research.
- Pass unannounced, reoccurring ion quizzes with a 90% or higher score. This may seem old school, but it is the surest way to analyze whether students have mastered the required skill set.
- Combine sketches/diagrams with written explanations to demonstrate understanding of core disciplinary content ideas.
- Apply analytical methods incorporating chemical symbols to solve real world practice problems.
Instructional Plan
My chemistry students are high achieving, motivated 9th and 10th graders at Lane Tech, a selective enrollment Chicago Public School. The student body is diverse and discipline problems are extremely rare. Our school has good institutional supports in place to aid implementation of new science curriculum incorporating technology. Several computer labs are available, as well as a department set of travelling Chromebooks, a great media center to watch video as a class, and Quizdom6 clickers ordered from DonorsChoose. I’m also planning on connecting with the stellar computer science faculty in my quest to build a mobile app this year. I rely heavily on my amazing team of ten fellow chemistry teachers and will continue doing so for as long as they’ll let me. The majority of the student body has cell phones and internet access at home, but since roughly two-thirds of our school qualifies for free/reduced lunch, I am always careful to allow at least two days for any assignment that requires internet access or printing outside of class. This way, students can use school computer labs or library resources if necessary. My only foreseeable concern is that we have just received a new assistant principal for our science department and a new principal will be appointed right before school begins.
I hope that by pursuing this reworking of a class that I’ve taught for ten years now, I can help students see above the minutia at the beginning of the course to encourage their passion, or at least appreciation, for physical science and its methodology. By frontloading so much time and effort on the beauty, mystery and wonder of science, I am hoping that we can uncover the need and stunning efficacy of the symbology of chemistry. The primary pedagogical methods I plan to employ are:
Lesson Details
Context –
Day 2 of for first year honors chemistry students. Class of 32 students, seated in groups of four.
Materials –
I hope that by pursuing this reworking of a class that I’ve taught for ten years now, I can help students see above the minutia at the beginning of the course to encourage their passion, or at least appreciation, for physical science and its methodology. By frontloading so much time and effort on the beauty, mystery and wonder of science, I am hoping that we can uncover the need and stunning efficacy of the symbology of chemistry. The primary pedagogical methods I plan to employ are:
- Lecture & Note-taking : I still find this to be an essential skill for students to develop before attending their first university class. If done well and used sparingly it remains an appropriate tool in any science teacher’s toolkit.
- Group work: This is historically where the best learning happens, allowing me time to focus on individual conversations or small breakout sessions for those in need. It’s also during this time that the cohesive nature of each class’s microculture really takes shape.
- Discussions: I make a point early on to get my students comfortable shifting efficiently between individual pondering, small group discussion and whole class discussion. All three will play at role in practically every class I teach.
- Writing: I will continue to focus on improving my students’ formal writing skills.
- Labs: My goal is for each week to contain a genuine lab experience (some guided inquiry, some traditionally procedural) and one awesome demo. These experiences are the primary topics for their writing efforts.
- Group projects: Less formal and not weighted as heavily as individual work, but still extremely valuable (see comments on Group work).
- Independent Student Projects: I’ll be implementing some form of genius hour in my class with the help of my Deep Play research.
Lesson Details
Context –
Day 2 of for first year honors chemistry students. Class of 32 students, seated in groups of four.
Materials –
- Color prints of science images (32 real images from Cosmigraphics & 32 fake images from Codex Seraphinianus)
- Benson, Michael. Cosmigraphics. New York: Abrams, 2014. Print.
- Serafini, Luigi. Codex Seraphinianus. Milan: Rizzoli. 2013.
- Envelopes containing captions for real science images
- FUN! Grow motivation for “learning to speak chemistry.”
- Introduce brainstorming and problem solving nature of this class.
- Highlight the helpfulness of working together instead of in isolation.
- Impress upon students that science is a work in progress made by regular people from across the ages, communicated using words, numbers, symbols and pictures.
- Students examine one real and one fake science image at their seat.
- Students complete the following statements about both images individually:
- This image shows ____________________?
- The field of science most closely associated with this image is _____________________?
- The more specific topic of (answer to b) that might be depicted in this image is __________________________?
- The language used in this image is ___________________________ ?
- The units used in this image are ______________________________?
- The year this image was probably created is ______________________ ?
- When finished answering questions images individually (10-15 min), students share images and answers with group, drafting a list of questions about the images during the 10-15 minute discussion.
- Allow groups one minute to choose one favorite question they wish to share with the group.
- Encourage one group at a time (no order, just voluntarily) to share their question and any accompanying images with the class.
- When all groups’ questions have been discussed, share the source books for images & allow students to read the description of their real image.
- Explain & take questions about homework assignment.
- Students conduct independent research to find a real science image that includes text and or units of some kind.
- Create and print a one-page color poster that includes the image, answers to the same six questions used in class today and the source of the image.
- Posters will be hung up in our room, so remind students to try hard to make them interesting and to make them look awesome!
Captions for Real Science Images
Source: Benson, Michael. Cosmigraphics. New York: Abrams, 2014. Print.
33) 1882 – During a meteor shower, individual meteors can all seem to radiate from one part of the sky, as in this print from the popular astronomy book The Heavens Above by Joseph Gillet and W.K.Rolfe.
34) 1619 – Johannes Kepler’s major legacy is his laws of planetary motion. The German mathematician ans astronomer was the first to realize that planets move in elliptical orbits – a revolutionary finding that suddenly clarified previously confounding inconsistencies in their motions. Kepler’s laws were the most significant breakthrough since Copernicus, and were the starting point for Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But when Kepler’s focus turned to comets, which exhibit orbits so elongated that they’re parabolic, he resolutely held to the line that they unwaveringly hold to a line. The astonishing curvilinear waveform in this print from Kepler’s treatise De cometis libelli tres (The Comets in Three Books) seems to predict twentieth and twenty-first century technology, architecture and design. It’s computer graphics centuries before mechanical computation. But if you look closely, you will see that the comet moving toward the sun at an angle from the lower right to the upper left is in fact travelling in a straight line. It had been understood since the mid-sixteenth century that cometary tails always point away from the sun. The curving waveform here is associated with the changing angles to the tail. This comet was likely the last and most spectacular of the three that appeared in rapid succession in the fall of 1618.
35) 2008 – Because of the abundance of hydrogen in the Milky Way, one imaging technique in astronomy is particularly effective; it limits the data collected to a narrow wavelength best suited to recording the hydrogen, known as the H-alpha spectral line. This view toward the center of the Milky Way is based on H-alpha observations by astrophysicist Douglas Finkbeiner, as presented in “Milky Way Explorer,” an interactive map at cartographer Kevin Jardine’s comprehensive site, GalaxyMap.org. (Each ring centers on a catalogued nebula.)
36) 1948 – Throughout the 1940’s Czech astronomer Antonin Becavar worked at the Skalnate Pleso observatory in the Tatra mountains, Slovakia, compiling a vast index of interstellar objects including stars, galaxies, nebulae and interstellar dust clouds. In 1948 the Czech Astonomical Society published the first edition of his Skalnate Pleso Atlas of the Heavens, which contained sixteen hand-drawn charts by Becvar. The atlas was a major step forward in stellar cartography, and when introduced to the international market the same year, it became an instant success, with most observatories and many amateur astronomers acquiring copies. This chart centers on Perseus, a constellation in a region of the Milky Way characterized by particularly dense molecular clouds, seen here in different hues of blue. The annual Perseids meteor shower originates in this section of the night sky. To the right on this map, a neighboring constellation, Andromeda, features the distant Andromeda Galaxy, visible as a red oval. Below it and to the left, another galaxy, Triangulum, can be seen. Both are members of our Local Group of galaxies.
37) 1866 – This view of the Milky way seen from the southern hemisphere comes from L’Espace Selestial (Celestial Space) by French astronomer Emmanuel Liais. Having served as director of the National Observatory in Rio de Janeiro from 1874 to 1881, Liais had plenty of opportunities to observe the southern skies. The Milky Way, as Thomas Wright had correctly deduced, appears as a thin band across all 360 degrees of sky visible from Earth because the solar system is embedded in its flattened disc.
38) 1750 - At the end of the eighteenth century, English astronomer Thomas Wright had taken to profitably questioning previous certainties concerning the form and structure of the universe. In his 1750 book, Wright presented his readers with a theory,” all the stars are, or may be, in motion…” Wright proposed another organizing principle for a “kind of regular irregularity of objects,” or a galaxy-size collection of individual stars. Asking the reader to imagine them extended like a plane, he puts Earth at A, and uses the other letters to illustrate how the view from Earth would be of a “perfect zone of light” on one plane-exactly as the Milky Way appears from the vantage point of a solar system inside it. He then states that if we agree with the premise that they must all be in motion, it stands to reason that they move not in straight lines but rather “in an orbit,” and that one of two ways they could do this is by “not much deviating from the same plane, as here. Although he hadn’t quite envisioned the spiral arms within the flattened disc, Wright had reasoned his way to the shape of what we now call a spiral galaxy.
39) 1610 – During his revelatory nights of observation using a telescope in the winter of 1609-1610, Galileo observed the stars as well as the moon and the planets. He discovered that while they didn’t assume the shapes of discs, like planets, many more of them were visible than could be seen with the naked eye. (Later , he contradicted himself, asserting that he could see stellar discs – something even the most powerful telescopes can’t. He was confused by the diffraction produced by his instrument.) In this depiction of the Pleiades open star cluster from Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger), a new plentitude of stars seem to burst off the pages. Only six of the Pleiades can be seen by the naked eye on a clear night from Earth; at a stroke, Galileo’s telescope had multiplied that number many times. For what is thought to be a Bronze Age depiction of the same star cluster, see #40.
40) 2000 to 1600 B.C.E. – Excavated illeagally in 1999 in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, the extraordinary Nebra Sky Disc is considered both the first known portable astronomical instrument and the oldest -known graphic depiction of celestial objects in human history. Made of blue-green copper inset with lustrous gold, the twelve-inch-wide disc contains an arrangement of seven stars probably representing the Pleiades. They’re in between a crescent moon on the right and either the full moon or sun in the center. Two golden bands at the disc’s edge (one is missing) span eighty-two degrees, corresponding to the angle between sunset at the winter and summer solstices at the latitude where it was found.
41) 1436 – In this illumination of Taurus the Bull from an updated and annotated edition by Ulugh Beg of Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars, the gold stars represent those that Ptolemy listed as internal to a constellation, and the red ones are those near that constellation. As with the al-Sufi illuminations on page 220, a star’s size represents its magnitude; one of the Persian astronomer’s major contributions was in fact his tabulation of star brightness. This particular illumination contains a star catalogued by Ptolemy that can’t be corroborated by actual observation. Ulugh Beg indicates its presence by circling it in red (it’s in the left horn).
42) 1 B.C.E – This Korean planispheric depiction of constellations was published in 1777, but is based on an engraving made on a stone column in 1395. Korean scholars who have studied it estimate in turn that the configuration for those stars dates some of these constellation figures, none of which are given human or animal forms, to between 1 B.C.E. This information has been handed forward, like a baton in a race, through the centuries.
43) 50 B.C.E. – When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, he brought along artist-archeologist Vivant Denon specifically to carry out cultural research. Among other discoveries, Denon spotted and intriguing bas-relief on the ceiling of a temple in Dendera: He’d stumbled on the first known depiction of the classical zodiac. The zodiac is a band of sky encompassing an area about eight degrees on either side of the sun’s apparent path, divided into twelve equal segments. It functions as a celestial coordinate system, and is filled by sonstellations, frequently represented by such figures as Taurus the Bull and Libra, a set of scales. Although the twelve-part zodiac is known to date back to Babylonian astronomy of the first millennium B.C.E., its representation in circular form was previously unknown. The Dendera temple ceiling relief has been interpreted as a copy of the Mesopotamian zodiac, and contains constellations in forms that are familiar to later Greek and Roman zodiacs, including Taurus, Libra, Scorpio, and Capricorn, as well as others in previously unknown Mesopotamian-Egyptian incarnations. Based on a study of planetary configurations and eclipse representations on that stone ceiling, reserachers have dated it to 50 BC.E.: the Ptolrmaic period. Denon’s find was later removed to Paris and is now in the Louvre museum.
44) 2011 – In 2009, NASA launched Kepler, an orbiting space telescope designed specifically to hunt for distant planets by detecting minute variations in the brightness of stars in its field of view. By May 2013, when the space telescope became disabled, it had found about 3,500 or so candidate planets. In 2011, Daniel Fabrycky of the Kepler science team put together an animated “orrery,” or simulation of a mechanical model of a solar system, presenting all the multiple-planet systems discovered by Kepler until February 2 of that year. The hotter the color, the larger the oplanet relative to other planets in its system, with cooler colors indicating smaller planets (red to yellow to green to cyan to blue to gray). This still image from Fabrycky can only hint at the effect of seeing all of Kepler’s worlds spinning in his orrery, but it’s easy to find online.
45) 1989 to 1992 – This geologic map of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, which has a surface made predominantly of rock-hard water ice, is perhaps the most striking yet created for an extraterrestrial body. At 3,273 miles in diameter, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and slightly larger than the planet Mercury, though not as massive. An icy satellite subject to powerful gravitational stresses due to continuous interactions with its three large sister moons and massive Jupiter, Ganymede’s surface exhibits an ancient cratered landscape interrupted by lighter grooves of terrain disrupted by global tectonic forces. Furrows, troughs and linear grooves characterize the topography of the Philus Sulcus quadrangle of Ganymede, opposite the Jupiter facing side. IN this 1989 map, blues and greens signify the moon’s lighter, disrupted materials; maroon and olive green, its darker materials; and various shades of yellow, crater material.
46) 1965 – On July 15, 1965, U.S. space probe Mariner 4 flew by Mars at a closest approach of about six thousand miles, transmitting twenty-one images-the first close-up pictures of another planet. Because computers of the time were so slow, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, knew that it would be many hours before they would see any print from the stream of numbers constituting Mariner’s image data. Impatient to see Mars, JPL engineer Richard Grumm and several colleagues printed out individual strips of data, assembled them on a backing board and ran to the local art supply store to buy pastel crayons. Because the numbers on each strip indicated the brightness values of that part of the image, Grumm was able to color the strips in close approximation to what Mariner was actually seeing of Mars. The result was a landmark not only in the graphic representation of space, but also in the early history of digital photography. Grumm’s initials can be seen in the lower right-hand side of the picture. The darker brown patch also on the lower right is space, with the limb of the planet represented by the wavy red-brown line. Neither Mariner 4 nor any subsequent spacecraft found any evidence of canals.
47) 1894 – This print portraying Saturn as seen from high above one of its poles is both impressively realized and prescient. It would be more than a century before a spacecraft, NASA’s Cassini orbiter, would allow us to see the planet from this perspective; there’s nothing inaccurate about this illustration. (From French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s Astronomie populaire.)
48) 1693 to 1698 – Women did in fact sometimes find a route to becoming astronomers in the seventeenth century – albeit very rarely – with German astronomer-artist Maria Clara Elmmart being one of them. The daughter of a Nuremberg artist and amateur astronomer, Elmmart based these depictions od Saturn’s mysterius shape-shifting on a 1659 engraving by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. (She also did many paintings based on her own observations.) Using a more powerful telescopr than his predecessors, Huygens had been able to confirm his hypothesis that Saturn’s mysterius appendages, which had confounded Galileo and subsequent astronomers, were in fact “a thin flat ring, nowhere touching.” The plate in Huygen’s book Systema´Saturnium (The Saturn System) , which Elmmart’s painting is partly based on, presented observations of Saturn by astronomers prior to Huygens, including Galileo. At the top, Elmmart adds a more accurate depiction of Saturn and its rings- one that for some reason is not as true to the actual planet as several plates by Huygens from the same book however. Still, this unique painting contains the results of observations by ten or more astronomers – a kind of sequential astronomical palimpsest.
49) 2014 – This staggering supercomputer visualization depicts for the first time gravitational flow lines knitting together a galaxy-spangled expanse of space-time well over 500 million light-years in diameter. Approximately thirty thousand galaxies are represented, with red and black lines each associated with two distinct basins of gravitational attraction. As part of the Local Group of the Supercluster, the Milky Way belongs to the black flow lines. These drain toward what has been called the Great Attractor, near the Norma Cluster, or directly above the green crescent shape at the center. The flows in red are associated with the Perseus-Pisces filament, our nearest neighboring largescale structure, which is directly above the “Y” in the central nexus of the red lines. In 2014, astronomer R. Brent Tully and his colleagues gave the new name “Laniakea Supercluster” to the full domain of the flows in black. A vast filamentary arch seems to connect the Laniakea and Perseus-Pisces structures; it surrounds the Local Void. The colors of the galaxy dots represent major structural components, with blue being galaxies that are part of the Perseus-Pisces filament; purple those belonging to the Pavo-Indus filament; green those in the historical Local Supercluster; orange the great Attractor region; magenta the Antlia Wall and Fomax/Eridanus cloud; and grat being everything else. For the first time with this research, Tully and his collaborators are seeing the full outlines of the vast region of attraction that the Milky Way is a part of. However, it’s important to mention the cosmic expansion is in fact the dominant force in the universe, so everything here is actually flying apart. The field lines are what can be discerned when that expansion is taken out.
50) 2003 – Conformal map of the universe on logarithmic scales containing the top of that map terminating in the first stars, cosmic background radiation, and the Big Bang. Because depictions of the universe in a single projection had been rare and unsatisfactory, in 2005, Princeton cosmologist J. Richard Gott III and researcher Mario Juric set about making one adequate to the task. Although its extreme aspect ratio makes reproducing it a challenge (it’s more than six and a half times taller than it is wide), Gott and Juric’s map remains an extraordinary document. Their choice of a logarithmic scale, in which units of measurement increase exponentially, allowed them to squeeze everything onto one map. In plotting source data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, using their logarithmic projection technique, Gott and Juric discovered a giant wall of galaxies – here visible as the thickest blue line in the mass of galaxies on the upper right of the detail view. At 1.38 billion light-years long – about one-sixtieth the diameter of the visible universe – their Sloan Great Wall was the largest single structure yet seen. In discovering the structure while making their map, they reversed centuries of cartographic tradition, in which discoveries are made first and then charted later.
51) 1982 – If this depiction of the universe by Italian astronomer Francesco Bertola appears to return to a geocentric scheme, that’s because.it does – albeit as a cartographical strategy informed by a contemporary cosmology which decrees that no center exists. If the universe is homogenous and isotropic, as the cosmological principle states – meaning it will look more or less the same, at least on large scales, to any observer anywhere in it, looking in any direction – then the center will do, because all places function as a local center of space-time. First published in Scienzo e tecnio, annuario (Science and Technology Yearbook), this graphic representation of what we might call a one-sphere cosmos contains the entire timeline of the universe, from the Big Bang (the outer black line of the circle) through a period of foggy opacity known as the recombination epoch (represented by the entire outer ring of the schematic), then onto protogalaxy formation (the yellow kidneys), then to the emergence of the first quasars (the red dots), and finally a progression of increasingly mature galaxy morphologies (the blue shapes). The vertical axis contains logarithmic scale of the distance in light-years to the edge of the observable universe, which doubles as the estimated number of years since the Big Bang. The horizontal axis uses a similar logarithmic scale to tabulate the velocity of the expansion of the universe based on the redshift of the objects seen at different distance. (Redshift is a phenomenon in which light from a receding object, be it a jet plane or a galaxy, shifts to longer wavelengths, or the red side of the electromagnetic spectrum.)
52) After 1277 – Diagram of the phases of the moon. This illumination by an unknown Franco-Flemish illustrator demonstrates a clear understanding of the relationship between the moon’s phases and its orientation vis-à-vis the sun.
53) 1944 – Starting in the modern era with English geologist William Smith in the early nineteenth century, the idea of mapping geology augmented the communication of spatial information in cartography. Because geology deals with history and processes that unfold in time, this introduced the element of time into mapping. In the early 1940’s geologist Harold N. Fisk, of Louisiana State University, conducted a comprehensive geological survey of the alluvial plain of the lower Mississippi, producing a stunning series of maps for the Army Corps of Engineers. By charting the multiple overlapping meanders of the waterway through time, he produced a beautiful temporal tracery.
54) 1493 – More than a hundred years before Fludd, German physician and cartographer Hartmann Schedel presented the six days of creation in a series of woodcuts in his Nuremberg Chronicle. Depicted here is Day 4, in which the universe has been divided into a recognizably orderly terracentric, Ptolemaic scheme in the Earth is upside down and surrounded by heavenly spheres, including one for each of the seven known planets at that time; a sphere containing stars; and an outermost sphere representing the primum mobile, or the “first moving sphere.”
55) 2013 – All-sky view of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the oldest discernable echo of the Big Bang in the perceivable universe. This image, from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope, reveals small fluctuations in the density of this ancient radiation, representing slight temperature differences. Visible in all directions, the cosmic microwave radiation background was used by the Planck team in 2013 to date the Big Bang to 13.81 billion years ago-making it slightly older than previous estimates. Their results also confirm that most of the universe is made of a cryptic substance that physicists are calling “dark energy.” The radiations represented in this image date back to the so-called era of recombination, when the universe became transparent to light for the first time. While more or less uniform in all directions, unexplained regional variations are visible. The temperature of this relic radiation has cooled with time; it is currently only 2.725 degrees Celsius above absolute zero (negative 270.275 degrees Celsius).
56) 1969 – On July 20, 1969, human beings landed on the moon for the first time. The next day U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module and set foot on the moon’s surface. Apart from being a definitive moment in human history, the event ended the U.S.-Soviet race that had dominated the 1960’s, achieving a goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The three astronauts of Apollo 11 returned safely to Earth on July 24. This is a contemporary reconstruction of Apollo 11 traverse map originally released late October 1969 by NASA. The map shows the tracks the astronauts made as reconstructed from still frames and TV footage.
57) 1664 – This incendiary depiction of the sun by German renaissance man Athanasius Kircher was widely reproduced, frequently without credit, for hundreds of years after. However, Kircher, memorably described in Encyclopedia Britannica as “a one-man intellectual clearinghouse,” frequently only glancingly cited sources fundamental to sections of his work, as well – though in fairness contemporary rules about such usage had not yet been established. In any case, as has been pointed out by some contemporary writers, there’s a proto-postmodern, early steampunk quality to much of Kircher’s work. This radiant image, from his book Mundus subterraneus, is no exception.
58) 1872 – During his first year on the staff of Harvard College Observatory, artist-astronomer Etienne Trouvelot produced these engravings of solar phenomena for the observatory’s Annals. Here Trouvelot depicted prominences on the sun’s limb in nuanced detail. The distance between the two prominences in the lower part of the engraving is one hundred thousand miles-or more than twelve times the diameter of the Earth. Although the Annals of Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College didn’t have a wide circulation, illustrations such as these increasingly infiltrated more widely disseminated publications, and played a role in influencing public understanding of the visual qualities and staggering scale of phenomena being observed through telescopes.
59) 1644 – Toward the end of the first half of the seventeenth century, French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, the inventor of analytical geometry, was increasingly drawn to questions of cosmology. Because Aristotle decreed the principle horror vacui or “nature abhors a vacuum,” for centuries the space between the spheres was said to be filled with a mysterious substance called ether. Descartes proposed instead that everything in the universe was made of tiny particles he called “corpuscles,” and that they also swirled in the space between celestial objects. With Aristotle’s spheres increasingly discredited as a cosmological model, and in an effort to understand the mysterious forces that seem to hold celestial bodies together and govern their movement, Descartes developed a theory in which the innumerable corpuscles ostensibly filling the vast spaces between celestial objects must be filled with vortices. In this illustration from his book Principia philosophae (Principles of Philosophy), Descartes depicts a comet buffeted by vortices as it traces a sinuous path through the solar system. He developed dour laws of motion based on his corpuscular cosmology.
60) 1660 – A radiant transformation of Copernicus’s spare diagram. In this depiction of the Copernican universe from Andreas Cellarius’s Harmonia macrocosmica, the sun dominates the solar system. Note that the moon is shown patrolling the sublunary sphere; Copernicus didn’t throughout Ptolemaic concepts, he reordered them. The legend in Latin outside the Earth’s sphere reads in part, “Sublunary sphere with the four elements themselves about the Sun.”
61) 1479 - A good deal of mystery surrounds the famous Aztec Sun Stone, which was discovered in the main square of Mexico City in December of 1790, and is thought to date from around 1479. One thing that is clear is the sun played a central role in the Aztec culture that flourished in what’s now Mexico from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Some sources indicate that the Aztecs believed their sun god, Tonatiuh, required human sacrifices or the sun would stop moving through the sky. According to one theory, the stone was likely mounted face up at the symbolic center of Aztec culture and used for human sacrifices in which the heart of the sacrificial subject was then offered up, still beating, to the sun god. Whatever its function, as Mexican astronomer and archaeologist Antonio de Leon y Gama correctly pointed out in 1792, in the book this illustration came from, the stone could only have been made by a civilization possessing a good deal of knowledge of geometry and mechanics; the perfectly symmetrical stone is almost twelve feet wide and weighs more than twenty tons. The face at the stone’s center is thought to represent Tonatiuh, and details of the surrounding stonework suggest calendric significance. Some sources claim that the stone contains both Aztec calendars, the secular and the ritual (the first regulated agriculture and the second was used by priests). It is possible that the stone played a role in the fifty-two-year cycle that was one foundation of Aztec civilization. The extent of our ignorance about its true function and the symbolic meanings encoded in the Sun Stone is a clear indication of the totality of the destruction visited on Aztec culture by marauding European conquistadors.
62) 1520 to 1541 – Although Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of of Heavenly Spheres) was only published in 1543, he had assembled the observational backing to his heliocentric theory over several decades. At first glance, this simple diagram surrounded by neat handwriting might seem just another depiction of the Ptolemaic cosmos – and a rather simple one at that – until one notices the word sol at its center for “sun.” Not so simple. Marveling at the “skilled draftsmanship, the precise hand, and, above all, the way in which he has elegantly written his text around the famous diagram of the heliocentric system,” astronomer-historian Owen-Gingerich has called Copernicus’s original manuscript” perhaps the most priceless artifact of the entire scientific renaissance.” Effectively, Copernicus had disassembled the celestial spheres first conceptualized by the ancient Greeks, and later refined by Ptolemy in the A.D. 1oo’s, and found them wanting. And so he reassembled them this time with the sun at their center.
63) 1540 – This disc from German printer and cosmographer Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum (Caesar’s Astronomy) allows the user to calculate the latitude of Mercury at any time during the year. By and large, the planets all move in a westward diurnal motion along with the background stars, while simultaneously gradually creeping eastward among them, until they return to something like their original position. And they largely stay within the zodiac, that imaginary band of sky eight degrees above and below the path of the sun. But the motion of all the planets is interrupted annually but brief episodes of “retrograde” westward motion, with the duration of that motion different for each. Mercury switches from an eastward to westward direction every 116 days. When turned, the lines of the waveform visible in this volvelle allowed the user to compensate for variations in Mercury’s apparent motion and position it with accuracy on the ecliptic.
64) 1610 – On the night of January 7,1610, a professor of mathematics at the University of Padua turned a telescope of his own design toward Jupiter – one of the “wandering stars,” or planets, of the ancients. Depending on which one he was using that night, Galileo Galilei’s telescope was capable of magnifying by twenty or thirty times. Either would have been enough to just make out a planetary disc, but what immediately caught Galileo’s attention was the presence of what he took to be three stars arranged in a line along the planet’s equator, with two on the eastern and one on the western side. At first he assumed this to be a fortuitous asterism, or chance alignment. But on subsequent nights, he observed not only that they had tagged along with Jupiter as the planet traveled on its then retrograde westward course against background stars, but that a fourth had joined them as well! This page from Galileo’s book Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger) details four evenings spent observing the motions of what are now known as the Galilean satellites. Along with Venus exhibiting phases like the moon, something he observed later the same year, this was the first substantial empirical evidence in support of Copernicus’s theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth moved. If Jupiter could keep its satellites while moving, Earth could as well.
34) 1619 – Johannes Kepler’s major legacy is his laws of planetary motion. The German mathematician ans astronomer was the first to realize that planets move in elliptical orbits – a revolutionary finding that suddenly clarified previously confounding inconsistencies in their motions. Kepler’s laws were the most significant breakthrough since Copernicus, and were the starting point for Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But when Kepler’s focus turned to comets, which exhibit orbits so elongated that they’re parabolic, he resolutely held to the line that they unwaveringly hold to a line. The astonishing curvilinear waveform in this print from Kepler’s treatise De cometis libelli tres (The Comets in Three Books) seems to predict twentieth and twenty-first century technology, architecture and design. It’s computer graphics centuries before mechanical computation. But if you look closely, you will see that the comet moving toward the sun at an angle from the lower right to the upper left is in fact travelling in a straight line. It had been understood since the mid-sixteenth century that cometary tails always point away from the sun. The curving waveform here is associated with the changing angles to the tail. This comet was likely the last and most spectacular of the three that appeared in rapid succession in the fall of 1618.
35) 2008 – Because of the abundance of hydrogen in the Milky Way, one imaging technique in astronomy is particularly effective; it limits the data collected to a narrow wavelength best suited to recording the hydrogen, known as the H-alpha spectral line. This view toward the center of the Milky Way is based on H-alpha observations by astrophysicist Douglas Finkbeiner, as presented in “Milky Way Explorer,” an interactive map at cartographer Kevin Jardine’s comprehensive site, GalaxyMap.org. (Each ring centers on a catalogued nebula.)
36) 1948 – Throughout the 1940’s Czech astronomer Antonin Becavar worked at the Skalnate Pleso observatory in the Tatra mountains, Slovakia, compiling a vast index of interstellar objects including stars, galaxies, nebulae and interstellar dust clouds. In 1948 the Czech Astonomical Society published the first edition of his Skalnate Pleso Atlas of the Heavens, which contained sixteen hand-drawn charts by Becvar. The atlas was a major step forward in stellar cartography, and when introduced to the international market the same year, it became an instant success, with most observatories and many amateur astronomers acquiring copies. This chart centers on Perseus, a constellation in a region of the Milky Way characterized by particularly dense molecular clouds, seen here in different hues of blue. The annual Perseids meteor shower originates in this section of the night sky. To the right on this map, a neighboring constellation, Andromeda, features the distant Andromeda Galaxy, visible as a red oval. Below it and to the left, another galaxy, Triangulum, can be seen. Both are members of our Local Group of galaxies.
37) 1866 – This view of the Milky way seen from the southern hemisphere comes from L’Espace Selestial (Celestial Space) by French astronomer Emmanuel Liais. Having served as director of the National Observatory in Rio de Janeiro from 1874 to 1881, Liais had plenty of opportunities to observe the southern skies. The Milky Way, as Thomas Wright had correctly deduced, appears as a thin band across all 360 degrees of sky visible from Earth because the solar system is embedded in its flattened disc.
38) 1750 - At the end of the eighteenth century, English astronomer Thomas Wright had taken to profitably questioning previous certainties concerning the form and structure of the universe. In his 1750 book, Wright presented his readers with a theory,” all the stars are, or may be, in motion…” Wright proposed another organizing principle for a “kind of regular irregularity of objects,” or a galaxy-size collection of individual stars. Asking the reader to imagine them extended like a plane, he puts Earth at A, and uses the other letters to illustrate how the view from Earth would be of a “perfect zone of light” on one plane-exactly as the Milky Way appears from the vantage point of a solar system inside it. He then states that if we agree with the premise that they must all be in motion, it stands to reason that they move not in straight lines but rather “in an orbit,” and that one of two ways they could do this is by “not much deviating from the same plane, as here. Although he hadn’t quite envisioned the spiral arms within the flattened disc, Wright had reasoned his way to the shape of what we now call a spiral galaxy.
39) 1610 – During his revelatory nights of observation using a telescope in the winter of 1609-1610, Galileo observed the stars as well as the moon and the planets. He discovered that while they didn’t assume the shapes of discs, like planets, many more of them were visible than could be seen with the naked eye. (Later , he contradicted himself, asserting that he could see stellar discs – something even the most powerful telescopes can’t. He was confused by the diffraction produced by his instrument.) In this depiction of the Pleiades open star cluster from Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger), a new plentitude of stars seem to burst off the pages. Only six of the Pleiades can be seen by the naked eye on a clear night from Earth; at a stroke, Galileo’s telescope had multiplied that number many times. For what is thought to be a Bronze Age depiction of the same star cluster, see #40.
40) 2000 to 1600 B.C.E. – Excavated illeagally in 1999 in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, the extraordinary Nebra Sky Disc is considered both the first known portable astronomical instrument and the oldest -known graphic depiction of celestial objects in human history. Made of blue-green copper inset with lustrous gold, the twelve-inch-wide disc contains an arrangement of seven stars probably representing the Pleiades. They’re in between a crescent moon on the right and either the full moon or sun in the center. Two golden bands at the disc’s edge (one is missing) span eighty-two degrees, corresponding to the angle between sunset at the winter and summer solstices at the latitude where it was found.
41) 1436 – In this illumination of Taurus the Bull from an updated and annotated edition by Ulugh Beg of Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars, the gold stars represent those that Ptolemy listed as internal to a constellation, and the red ones are those near that constellation. As with the al-Sufi illuminations on page 220, a star’s size represents its magnitude; one of the Persian astronomer’s major contributions was in fact his tabulation of star brightness. This particular illumination contains a star catalogued by Ptolemy that can’t be corroborated by actual observation. Ulugh Beg indicates its presence by circling it in red (it’s in the left horn).
42) 1 B.C.E – This Korean planispheric depiction of constellations was published in 1777, but is based on an engraving made on a stone column in 1395. Korean scholars who have studied it estimate in turn that the configuration for those stars dates some of these constellation figures, none of which are given human or animal forms, to between 1 B.C.E. This information has been handed forward, like a baton in a race, through the centuries.
43) 50 B.C.E. – When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, he brought along artist-archeologist Vivant Denon specifically to carry out cultural research. Among other discoveries, Denon spotted and intriguing bas-relief on the ceiling of a temple in Dendera: He’d stumbled on the first known depiction of the classical zodiac. The zodiac is a band of sky encompassing an area about eight degrees on either side of the sun’s apparent path, divided into twelve equal segments. It functions as a celestial coordinate system, and is filled by sonstellations, frequently represented by such figures as Taurus the Bull and Libra, a set of scales. Although the twelve-part zodiac is known to date back to Babylonian astronomy of the first millennium B.C.E., its representation in circular form was previously unknown. The Dendera temple ceiling relief has been interpreted as a copy of the Mesopotamian zodiac, and contains constellations in forms that are familiar to later Greek and Roman zodiacs, including Taurus, Libra, Scorpio, and Capricorn, as well as others in previously unknown Mesopotamian-Egyptian incarnations. Based on a study of planetary configurations and eclipse representations on that stone ceiling, reserachers have dated it to 50 BC.E.: the Ptolrmaic period. Denon’s find was later removed to Paris and is now in the Louvre museum.
44) 2011 – In 2009, NASA launched Kepler, an orbiting space telescope designed specifically to hunt for distant planets by detecting minute variations in the brightness of stars in its field of view. By May 2013, when the space telescope became disabled, it had found about 3,500 or so candidate planets. In 2011, Daniel Fabrycky of the Kepler science team put together an animated “orrery,” or simulation of a mechanical model of a solar system, presenting all the multiple-planet systems discovered by Kepler until February 2 of that year. The hotter the color, the larger the oplanet relative to other planets in its system, with cooler colors indicating smaller planets (red to yellow to green to cyan to blue to gray). This still image from Fabrycky can only hint at the effect of seeing all of Kepler’s worlds spinning in his orrery, but it’s easy to find online.
45) 1989 to 1992 – This geologic map of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, which has a surface made predominantly of rock-hard water ice, is perhaps the most striking yet created for an extraterrestrial body. At 3,273 miles in diameter, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and slightly larger than the planet Mercury, though not as massive. An icy satellite subject to powerful gravitational stresses due to continuous interactions with its three large sister moons and massive Jupiter, Ganymede’s surface exhibits an ancient cratered landscape interrupted by lighter grooves of terrain disrupted by global tectonic forces. Furrows, troughs and linear grooves characterize the topography of the Philus Sulcus quadrangle of Ganymede, opposite the Jupiter facing side. IN this 1989 map, blues and greens signify the moon’s lighter, disrupted materials; maroon and olive green, its darker materials; and various shades of yellow, crater material.
46) 1965 – On July 15, 1965, U.S. space probe Mariner 4 flew by Mars at a closest approach of about six thousand miles, transmitting twenty-one images-the first close-up pictures of another planet. Because computers of the time were so slow, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, knew that it would be many hours before they would see any print from the stream of numbers constituting Mariner’s image data. Impatient to see Mars, JPL engineer Richard Grumm and several colleagues printed out individual strips of data, assembled them on a backing board and ran to the local art supply store to buy pastel crayons. Because the numbers on each strip indicated the brightness values of that part of the image, Grumm was able to color the strips in close approximation to what Mariner was actually seeing of Mars. The result was a landmark not only in the graphic representation of space, but also in the early history of digital photography. Grumm’s initials can be seen in the lower right-hand side of the picture. The darker brown patch also on the lower right is space, with the limb of the planet represented by the wavy red-brown line. Neither Mariner 4 nor any subsequent spacecraft found any evidence of canals.
47) 1894 – This print portraying Saturn as seen from high above one of its poles is both impressively realized and prescient. It would be more than a century before a spacecraft, NASA’s Cassini orbiter, would allow us to see the planet from this perspective; there’s nothing inaccurate about this illustration. (From French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s Astronomie populaire.)
48) 1693 to 1698 – Women did in fact sometimes find a route to becoming astronomers in the seventeenth century – albeit very rarely – with German astronomer-artist Maria Clara Elmmart being one of them. The daughter of a Nuremberg artist and amateur astronomer, Elmmart based these depictions od Saturn’s mysterius shape-shifting on a 1659 engraving by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. (She also did many paintings based on her own observations.) Using a more powerful telescopr than his predecessors, Huygens had been able to confirm his hypothesis that Saturn’s mysterius appendages, which had confounded Galileo and subsequent astronomers, were in fact “a thin flat ring, nowhere touching.” The plate in Huygen’s book Systema´Saturnium (The Saturn System) , which Elmmart’s painting is partly based on, presented observations of Saturn by astronomers prior to Huygens, including Galileo. At the top, Elmmart adds a more accurate depiction of Saturn and its rings- one that for some reason is not as true to the actual planet as several plates by Huygens from the same book however. Still, this unique painting contains the results of observations by ten or more astronomers – a kind of sequential astronomical palimpsest.
49) 2014 – This staggering supercomputer visualization depicts for the first time gravitational flow lines knitting together a galaxy-spangled expanse of space-time well over 500 million light-years in diameter. Approximately thirty thousand galaxies are represented, with red and black lines each associated with two distinct basins of gravitational attraction. As part of the Local Group of the Supercluster, the Milky Way belongs to the black flow lines. These drain toward what has been called the Great Attractor, near the Norma Cluster, or directly above the green crescent shape at the center. The flows in red are associated with the Perseus-Pisces filament, our nearest neighboring largescale structure, which is directly above the “Y” in the central nexus of the red lines. In 2014, astronomer R. Brent Tully and his colleagues gave the new name “Laniakea Supercluster” to the full domain of the flows in black. A vast filamentary arch seems to connect the Laniakea and Perseus-Pisces structures; it surrounds the Local Void. The colors of the galaxy dots represent major structural components, with blue being galaxies that are part of the Perseus-Pisces filament; purple those belonging to the Pavo-Indus filament; green those in the historical Local Supercluster; orange the great Attractor region; magenta the Antlia Wall and Fomax/Eridanus cloud; and grat being everything else. For the first time with this research, Tully and his collaborators are seeing the full outlines of the vast region of attraction that the Milky Way is a part of. However, it’s important to mention the cosmic expansion is in fact the dominant force in the universe, so everything here is actually flying apart. The field lines are what can be discerned when that expansion is taken out.
50) 2003 – Conformal map of the universe on logarithmic scales containing the top of that map terminating in the first stars, cosmic background radiation, and the Big Bang. Because depictions of the universe in a single projection had been rare and unsatisfactory, in 2005, Princeton cosmologist J. Richard Gott III and researcher Mario Juric set about making one adequate to the task. Although its extreme aspect ratio makes reproducing it a challenge (it’s more than six and a half times taller than it is wide), Gott and Juric’s map remains an extraordinary document. Their choice of a logarithmic scale, in which units of measurement increase exponentially, allowed them to squeeze everything onto one map. In plotting source data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, using their logarithmic projection technique, Gott and Juric discovered a giant wall of galaxies – here visible as the thickest blue line in the mass of galaxies on the upper right of the detail view. At 1.38 billion light-years long – about one-sixtieth the diameter of the visible universe – their Sloan Great Wall was the largest single structure yet seen. In discovering the structure while making their map, they reversed centuries of cartographic tradition, in which discoveries are made first and then charted later.
51) 1982 – If this depiction of the universe by Italian astronomer Francesco Bertola appears to return to a geocentric scheme, that’s because.it does – albeit as a cartographical strategy informed by a contemporary cosmology which decrees that no center exists. If the universe is homogenous and isotropic, as the cosmological principle states – meaning it will look more or less the same, at least on large scales, to any observer anywhere in it, looking in any direction – then the center will do, because all places function as a local center of space-time. First published in Scienzo e tecnio, annuario (Science and Technology Yearbook), this graphic representation of what we might call a one-sphere cosmos contains the entire timeline of the universe, from the Big Bang (the outer black line of the circle) through a period of foggy opacity known as the recombination epoch (represented by the entire outer ring of the schematic), then onto protogalaxy formation (the yellow kidneys), then to the emergence of the first quasars (the red dots), and finally a progression of increasingly mature galaxy morphologies (the blue shapes). The vertical axis contains logarithmic scale of the distance in light-years to the edge of the observable universe, which doubles as the estimated number of years since the Big Bang. The horizontal axis uses a similar logarithmic scale to tabulate the velocity of the expansion of the universe based on the redshift of the objects seen at different distance. (Redshift is a phenomenon in which light from a receding object, be it a jet plane or a galaxy, shifts to longer wavelengths, or the red side of the electromagnetic spectrum.)
52) After 1277 – Diagram of the phases of the moon. This illumination by an unknown Franco-Flemish illustrator demonstrates a clear understanding of the relationship between the moon’s phases and its orientation vis-à-vis the sun.
53) 1944 – Starting in the modern era with English geologist William Smith in the early nineteenth century, the idea of mapping geology augmented the communication of spatial information in cartography. Because geology deals with history and processes that unfold in time, this introduced the element of time into mapping. In the early 1940’s geologist Harold N. Fisk, of Louisiana State University, conducted a comprehensive geological survey of the alluvial plain of the lower Mississippi, producing a stunning series of maps for the Army Corps of Engineers. By charting the multiple overlapping meanders of the waterway through time, he produced a beautiful temporal tracery.
54) 1493 – More than a hundred years before Fludd, German physician and cartographer Hartmann Schedel presented the six days of creation in a series of woodcuts in his Nuremberg Chronicle. Depicted here is Day 4, in which the universe has been divided into a recognizably orderly terracentric, Ptolemaic scheme in the Earth is upside down and surrounded by heavenly spheres, including one for each of the seven known planets at that time; a sphere containing stars; and an outermost sphere representing the primum mobile, or the “first moving sphere.”
55) 2013 – All-sky view of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the oldest discernable echo of the Big Bang in the perceivable universe. This image, from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope, reveals small fluctuations in the density of this ancient radiation, representing slight temperature differences. Visible in all directions, the cosmic microwave radiation background was used by the Planck team in 2013 to date the Big Bang to 13.81 billion years ago-making it slightly older than previous estimates. Their results also confirm that most of the universe is made of a cryptic substance that physicists are calling “dark energy.” The radiations represented in this image date back to the so-called era of recombination, when the universe became transparent to light for the first time. While more or less uniform in all directions, unexplained regional variations are visible. The temperature of this relic radiation has cooled with time; it is currently only 2.725 degrees Celsius above absolute zero (negative 270.275 degrees Celsius).
56) 1969 – On July 20, 1969, human beings landed on the moon for the first time. The next day U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module and set foot on the moon’s surface. Apart from being a definitive moment in human history, the event ended the U.S.-Soviet race that had dominated the 1960’s, achieving a goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The three astronauts of Apollo 11 returned safely to Earth on July 24. This is a contemporary reconstruction of Apollo 11 traverse map originally released late October 1969 by NASA. The map shows the tracks the astronauts made as reconstructed from still frames and TV footage.
57) 1664 – This incendiary depiction of the sun by German renaissance man Athanasius Kircher was widely reproduced, frequently without credit, for hundreds of years after. However, Kircher, memorably described in Encyclopedia Britannica as “a one-man intellectual clearinghouse,” frequently only glancingly cited sources fundamental to sections of his work, as well – though in fairness contemporary rules about such usage had not yet been established. In any case, as has been pointed out by some contemporary writers, there’s a proto-postmodern, early steampunk quality to much of Kircher’s work. This radiant image, from his book Mundus subterraneus, is no exception.
58) 1872 – During his first year on the staff of Harvard College Observatory, artist-astronomer Etienne Trouvelot produced these engravings of solar phenomena for the observatory’s Annals. Here Trouvelot depicted prominences on the sun’s limb in nuanced detail. The distance between the two prominences in the lower part of the engraving is one hundred thousand miles-or more than twelve times the diameter of the Earth. Although the Annals of Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College didn’t have a wide circulation, illustrations such as these increasingly infiltrated more widely disseminated publications, and played a role in influencing public understanding of the visual qualities and staggering scale of phenomena being observed through telescopes.
59) 1644 – Toward the end of the first half of the seventeenth century, French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, the inventor of analytical geometry, was increasingly drawn to questions of cosmology. Because Aristotle decreed the principle horror vacui or “nature abhors a vacuum,” for centuries the space between the spheres was said to be filled with a mysterious substance called ether. Descartes proposed instead that everything in the universe was made of tiny particles he called “corpuscles,” and that they also swirled in the space between celestial objects. With Aristotle’s spheres increasingly discredited as a cosmological model, and in an effort to understand the mysterious forces that seem to hold celestial bodies together and govern their movement, Descartes developed a theory in which the innumerable corpuscles ostensibly filling the vast spaces between celestial objects must be filled with vortices. In this illustration from his book Principia philosophae (Principles of Philosophy), Descartes depicts a comet buffeted by vortices as it traces a sinuous path through the solar system. He developed dour laws of motion based on his corpuscular cosmology.
60) 1660 – A radiant transformation of Copernicus’s spare diagram. In this depiction of the Copernican universe from Andreas Cellarius’s Harmonia macrocosmica, the sun dominates the solar system. Note that the moon is shown patrolling the sublunary sphere; Copernicus didn’t throughout Ptolemaic concepts, he reordered them. The legend in Latin outside the Earth’s sphere reads in part, “Sublunary sphere with the four elements themselves about the Sun.”
61) 1479 - A good deal of mystery surrounds the famous Aztec Sun Stone, which was discovered in the main square of Mexico City in December of 1790, and is thought to date from around 1479. One thing that is clear is the sun played a central role in the Aztec culture that flourished in what’s now Mexico from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Some sources indicate that the Aztecs believed their sun god, Tonatiuh, required human sacrifices or the sun would stop moving through the sky. According to one theory, the stone was likely mounted face up at the symbolic center of Aztec culture and used for human sacrifices in which the heart of the sacrificial subject was then offered up, still beating, to the sun god. Whatever its function, as Mexican astronomer and archaeologist Antonio de Leon y Gama correctly pointed out in 1792, in the book this illustration came from, the stone could only have been made by a civilization possessing a good deal of knowledge of geometry and mechanics; the perfectly symmetrical stone is almost twelve feet wide and weighs more than twenty tons. The face at the stone’s center is thought to represent Tonatiuh, and details of the surrounding stonework suggest calendric significance. Some sources claim that the stone contains both Aztec calendars, the secular and the ritual (the first regulated agriculture and the second was used by priests). It is possible that the stone played a role in the fifty-two-year cycle that was one foundation of Aztec civilization. The extent of our ignorance about its true function and the symbolic meanings encoded in the Sun Stone is a clear indication of the totality of the destruction visited on Aztec culture by marauding European conquistadors.
62) 1520 to 1541 – Although Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of of Heavenly Spheres) was only published in 1543, he had assembled the observational backing to his heliocentric theory over several decades. At first glance, this simple diagram surrounded by neat handwriting might seem just another depiction of the Ptolemaic cosmos – and a rather simple one at that – until one notices the word sol at its center for “sun.” Not so simple. Marveling at the “skilled draftsmanship, the precise hand, and, above all, the way in which he has elegantly written his text around the famous diagram of the heliocentric system,” astronomer-historian Owen-Gingerich has called Copernicus’s original manuscript” perhaps the most priceless artifact of the entire scientific renaissance.” Effectively, Copernicus had disassembled the celestial spheres first conceptualized by the ancient Greeks, and later refined by Ptolemy in the A.D. 1oo’s, and found them wanting. And so he reassembled them this time with the sun at their center.
63) 1540 – This disc from German printer and cosmographer Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum (Caesar’s Astronomy) allows the user to calculate the latitude of Mercury at any time during the year. By and large, the planets all move in a westward diurnal motion along with the background stars, while simultaneously gradually creeping eastward among them, until they return to something like their original position. And they largely stay within the zodiac, that imaginary band of sky eight degrees above and below the path of the sun. But the motion of all the planets is interrupted annually but brief episodes of “retrograde” westward motion, with the duration of that motion different for each. Mercury switches from an eastward to westward direction every 116 days. When turned, the lines of the waveform visible in this volvelle allowed the user to compensate for variations in Mercury’s apparent motion and position it with accuracy on the ecliptic.
64) 1610 – On the night of January 7,1610, a professor of mathematics at the University of Padua turned a telescope of his own design toward Jupiter – one of the “wandering stars,” or planets, of the ancients. Depending on which one he was using that night, Galileo Galilei’s telescope was capable of magnifying by twenty or thirty times. Either would have been enough to just make out a planetary disc, but what immediately caught Galileo’s attention was the presence of what he took to be three stars arranged in a line along the planet’s equator, with two on the eastern and one on the western side. At first he assumed this to be a fortuitous asterism, or chance alignment. But on subsequent nights, he observed not only that they had tagged along with Jupiter as the planet traveled on its then retrograde westward course against background stars, but that a fourth had joined them as well! This page from Galileo’s book Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger) details four evenings spent observing the motions of what are now known as the Galilean satellites. Along with Venus exhibiting phases like the moon, something he observed later the same year, this was the first substantial empirical evidence in support of Copernicus’s theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth moved. If Jupiter could keep its satellites while moving, Earth could as well.