Travel Through Time With These Strange and Beautiful Visualizations of the Universe
A dramatic early representation of a spherical Earth, from medieval visionary writer, composer, and proto-feminist Hildegard von Bingen State Library of Lucca
1210–30: In this illumination from a late work by the prolific medieval visionary writer, composer, and proto-feminist Hildegard von Bingen, the four seasons of a spherical Earth are represented. Although 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 Saint Hildegard’s last masterpiece, Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works).
State Library of Lucca
Professor Orlando Ferguson refutes the “globe theory” in this broadsheet bulletin from Hot Springs, South Dakota, proposing instead a kind of four-cornered, roulette-wheel world. Courtesy the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C.
1893: Professor Orlando Ferguson refutes the “globe theory” in this broadsheet bulletin from Hot Springs, South Dakota, 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. Ferguson’s cosmology didn’t catch on.
Courtesy the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C.
Physiographic map of the world’s oceans from 1976. Courtesy the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection
1976: Physiographic map of the world’s oceans. Although the land areas of Earth had been mapped to various degrees of accuracy by the twentieth century, the same could not be said of 70 percent of the planet’s surface—the ocean floor. In the early 1950s, working at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, pioneering oceanographer and cartographer Marie Tharp worked with geologist Bruce Heezen to conduct a comprehensive sonar survey of the Atlantic seabed, producing the first scientific map of any ocean floor. Tharp’s work exposed the existence of a continuous rift running down the middle of the mid-Atlantic ridge, clear evidence that the then widely dismissed theory of continental drift must be true. She and Heezen went on to map the entire ocean floor of Earth, in 1976 producing their magnum opus—the complete map of all the world’s oceans seen here. Tharp’s initial discovery of a tectonic plate boundary seam on the Atlantic seabed led to the finding of similarly irregular but continuous rifts in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. With this map, the entire surface of the Earth had finally been charted to a high degree of accuracy.
Courtesy the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection
Czech illustrator Ludek Pesek painted a a craggy lunar landscape with distant Earth low on the horizon in 1963. Courtesy Olga Shonova
1963: At the dawn of the space age, and before any meaningful exploration of space had really commenced, Czech illustrator Ludek Pesek depicted the solar system in multiple paintings made for a book titled The Moon and Planets, by Josef Sadil. This painting, of a craggy lunar landscape with distant Earth low on the horizon, comes from the book. Like his contemporary, American space illustrator Chesley Bonestell, Pesek was influenced by pioneering French space illustrator Lucien Rudaux. The rugged lunar mountains of pre-spaceflight popular imagination were soon to vanish as photos of the moon’s softly rounded topography came to Earth.
Courtesy Olga Shonova
An angel holds the celestial spheres in this medieval Islamic drawing. The Ashmolean Museum Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art
1550–1600: A single angel holds the entire assembly of celestial spheres in this manuscript illumination probably painted in western Iran in the second half of the sixteenth century. Arab cosmographer and geographer Zakarīyā’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini’s highly popular and influential book Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence, like his European contemporary Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera, went through innumerable editions for hundreds of years after it was written in 1270. But unlike Sacrobosco, whose relatively short text transmitted Ptolemaic astronomical principles to the early medieval world of Europe, al-Qazwini’s illustrated compendium of universal knowledge covers geography and natural history as well as astrology and Ptolemaic astronomy. Arab astronomy inherited the spheres of the Greeks, as seen here, while frequently infusing it with a mysticism well represented in this image.
The Ashmolean Museum Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art
A depiction of visible galaxies and clusters from a 2013 visualization Courtesy AMNH-Hayden Planetarium, from Dark Universe, directed by Carter Emmart, produced by Vivian Trakinski
2013: In this depiction of “look back time” from the Hayden Planetarium show Dark Universe, galaxy clusters extend out in twin lobes from a central Earth, with the empty areas being artifacts of the masking caused by an obscuring Milky Way. (In reality, we have every reason to assume that a spongy, foamlike haze of more than 150 billion galaxies extends in every direction without substantial gaps.) The Earth is positioned somewhere at the center, and the outer rim of the circle represents the Big Bang singularity and the dawn of time itself. The bright knots represent clusters of thousands of galaxies. Vast voids can also be seen between the denser areas. Dark Universe was directed by Carter Emmart.
Courtesy AMNH-Hayden Planetarium, from Dark Universe, directed by Carter Emmart, produced by Vivian Trakinski
A detailed map of the solar system from the 1800s. Courtesy the Library of Congress
1846: This map of the solar system by one Hall Colby is notable for one absence and several presences. While Colby’s map does portray planet Uranus and five of its moons, that’s not particularly notable, because Uranus had been discovered by John Herschel sixty-five years earlier. Among the interesting presences, then, are four “planets” visible here between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter: Vesta, Juno, Ceres, and Pallas. All were discovered in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and all were considered planets until the 1860s, when a tide of discoveries of ever-smaller objects in similar orbits demoted them to the rank of mere asteroids. (The four largest objects in the asteroid belt, all are still considered asteroids except Ceres, which is now a dwarf planet, the only one in the inner solar system. Pluto, missing here, has also been classified as a dwarf planet since 2006.) Another notable presence, if you look closely at the detail view of Colby’s map to the right, is that of a planet inside the orbit of Mercury: Vulcan. Although it may sound like it comes from Star Trek, Vulcan first entered the language of popular culture when its existence within this solar system was predicted by French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier in 1843. Le Verrier was so sure he named it, and promoted it widely in the hopes that astronomers would confirm his “discovery.” They tried for decades but came up short. As for the notable absence in Hall Colby’s map, it’s our current seventh of eight planets: Neptune. That’s because Neptune wasn’t discovered until September 24, 1846—months after this map, which was intended for schools, was printed. But what’s truly interesting is that Neptune was discovered due to the prediction of a French mathematician: one Urbain Le Verrier.
Courtesy the Library of Congress
A depiction of a total eclipse that occurred on May 12, 1706. Courtesy the Library of Congress
1700: On May 12, 1706, a dramatic total solar eclipse plunged a swath of Europe into darkness. The path of totality can be seen here within the wider penumbral shadow. This depiction of the event, a detail view of a polar projection of the southern celestial hemisphere made for Amsterdam cartographer Carel Allard, adopts an outside view—the viewer is implicitly positioned tens of thousands of miles above Earth’s North Pole. Images like this gradually set the stage for the idea that travel to such distances might one day be possible.
Courtesy the Library of Congress
A fiery and fanciful view of a comet. Courtesy Day & Faber
1547–52: Like eclipses, comets were seen as harbingers of disaster throughout European history. Most of the more than thirty comets whipping through the pages of the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch (Augsburg Miracles Book) are described as heralding some variety of plague, pestilence, war, or other natural or man-made disaster.
Courtesy Day & Faber
Another depiction of a comet from the mid-1500s. Courtesy Day & Faber
The text reads: “In a.d. 1300, a terrible comet appeared in the sky. And in this year, on St. Andrew’s Day, the soil was shaken by an earthquake so that many buildings collapsed. At this time, the first jubilee year was established by Pope Boniface VIII.”
Courtesy Day & Faber
What does the universe look like? How about the sun, moon, planets, and stars? These are probably question that humans have been asking themselves ever since we first looked up at the sky.
A new book, Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, looks at the imaginative variety of ways that people have answered these questions throughout history. In it, photographer and filmmaker Michael Benson collects thousands of years of human understanding about the heavens.
Cosmigraphics is divided into 10 chapters, each following the progression of ideas about some heavenly topic. For instance, one chapter centers around representations of the Earth. In it, you can see dramatic medieval conceptions of our planet surrounded by elemental water, air, and fire. There’s also a bizarre 19th century map refuting the theory that the Earth is sphere-shaped — instead postulating a four-cornered, roulette-wheel world more in accordance with Biblical (or something) principles. Finally, there are recent geographic drawings of river basins and ocean floors based on the enhanced technological capabilities of the modern world.
All images in the book are essentially data visualizations representing the accumulated knowledge of their time. Ancient people’s data was far more limited than ours, and mixed with erroneous beliefs about divine spirits, celestial spheres, and geocentric cosmologies. But looking back through history reminds us that our current scientific ideas no doubt contain inaccuracies and partial truths, limitations of the data at hand. With scientists still debating the inner workings of black holes, the properties of neutrinos, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, we realize the amount we have yet to know is as vast as the universe itself.
The book is also a good reminder of how big a deal the night sky was to pre-Industrial people. The movement of the sun and phases of the moon told them when to plant and harvest their crops. The changing stars and planets helped them interpret their own lives and their futures. Even today, you might get away from city lights and look up to feel a sense of wonder and awe, a slight tug from the collective unconscious of humanity that has been watching and thinking about the universe for so long.
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