Cellarius Northern Sky Star Map, 1708

The story of this map

This is plate 24 of the Harmonia Macrocosmica, Andreas Cellarius’s celestial atlas, and it is the one most people would choose for a wall: the northern sky, drawn as a single great disc with the constellations as the ancients imagined them. The Library of Congress copy is the 1708 Amsterdam edition by Valck and Schenk, printed from the 1660 copperplates and coloured by hand.

Ursa Major lumbers across the top, Draco coils around the pole, Hercules, Cassiopeia and Perseus take their places, and the twelve signs of the zodiac ring the outer edge. Every figure is drawn with a painter’s care, lions with real manes, a swan in full flight, and the hand colouring gives the whole sky a warm, lamplit tone rather than the cold black of a modern chart. “Antiquum” in the title simply means these are the classical constellations, the ones a Greek or Roman would have known.

It is a lovely print for a bedroom ceiling wall, a nursery, a study or anywhere someone looks up at night. The near-square format makes the 20x20 and 24x24 sizes particularly satisfying, and it holds its own as a single piece or as one of a pair.

It belongs to our Antique World Maps collection and was made to hang beside the Ptolemaic planisphere from the same atlas. Each print is made to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone and hand colour, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.