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Ignace-Gaston Pardies, a French Jesuit mathematician, died in 1673, one year before the first edition of his celestial atlas appeared in Paris. The work was later reissued in 1693 under the Latin title Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio: a description of the celestial globe reduced to plane tables.
The structure of the atlas is unusually suited to a paper reconstruction. Pardies divided the whole sky into six large charts drawn in gnomonic projection. In geometrical terms, the six charts can be read as the faces of a cube surrounding the celestial sphere. That is what makes the project so attractive for paper modelling: a printed sky can be unfolded, cut, reprojected and patiently brought back into a three-dimensional form.
The charts are also beautiful historical documents. They gather the constellation figures inherited from the early modern star-atlas tradition and place them over a dense astronomical catalogue: stars, constellation names, the Milky Way, comets and novae. The result is not a modern astronomical tool, but a material way to handle a seventeenth-century image of the heavens.
From the magnificent tables in the 1693 colored edition, after a series of digital processes by David Rumsey cartographic laboratory, I designed the gores for this celestial globe. David Rumsey put on line the hi-res tables and “played” with them, giving us a complete joined virtual view of Pardies map of the Heavens. The aim of my project is to realize a physical model everyone can built and admire.
This model turns Pardies’ printed sky into a 250 mm celestial globe.
Note: if you downloaded the first version of the model before December 3, 2013 and the pole holes are not well defined, you can improve the assembly by downloading the Pole Caps.
From the Linda Hall Library exhibition catalog: “Pardies’ star atlas is stylistically one of the most attractive ever published. Pardies took his constellation figures primarily from Bayer’s Uranometria, but since each chart covers a large section of the sky, these figures had to be carefully integrated, which was not an easy task. Pardies’ engraver accomplished this task with great success…The plate(which) shows Hercules, Ophiuchus] Scorpius, Sagittarius, Aquila, and Lyra,..is one of the most stunning compositions in the history of celestial cartography.”
Composite of all six plates trimmed and joined in a Cubic Projection.
The six plates are a gnomonic projection and can be arranged to form a cube: a cubic representation of the universe.
Download and build the Cubic Universe.
A smaller Christmas Ball version is also available. It keeps the same celestial source but turns the globe into a decorative ornament: a lighter object, less scholarly in intent, but very close to the spirit of printed paper globes.
Historical references: David Rumsey Map Collection; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Atlas Coelestis.
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