Dot, Letter, Legend: Johann Bayer's Graphic Code

Citation

Taveira, Mariana Vale (2025) Dot, Letter, Legend: Johann Bayer's Graphic Code. Other, California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/aw8c-0858. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechThesis:08122025-212632192

Abstract

[Introduction] In the Western imagination, the night sky long oscillated between myth and measurement. When the tenth-century Persian astronomer al-Sufi redrafted Ptolemy’s star list in his Book of Fixed Stars (964 CE), he paired naked-eye observations with richly painted constellation figures, proving that pictures could do double duty as both art and empirical record [1]. Late-medieval scholars echoed that hybrid style – Hyginus’s woodcuts (1482) filled the heavens with decorative heroes [2], while Alessandro Piccolomini’s De le Stelle Fisse (1540) spotlighted positional grids [3]. Yet none of these charts provided a visual idiom robust enough to anchor the new Copernican vision of a three-dimensional celestial sphere. That idiom arrived in 1603, when the Augsburg lawyer-uranographer Johann Bayer published Uranometria [4].

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