Jay M. Pasachoff

John Bevis's 18th-century Atlas Celeste: An Oft-Overlooked Treasure

Abstract

John Bevis's star atlas, technically unpublished but available mid-18th-century, ranks with Bayer's 1603 Uranographia, Hevelius's 1690 Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia, Flamsteed's Atlas Coelestis (1729), and Bode's 1801 Uranographia as the most beautiful and influential celestial atlases. Bevis's atlas contains large-scale 52 engraved plates.

In 1997, a Uranographia Britannica (or Atlas Celeste) belonging to the Manchester Astronomical Society was found at the Godlee Observatory, Manchester University; it has been studied especially by one of us (KK). (A copy is available on a DVD, recently updated, 2014.) Another copy of the atlas was purchased in London in 2001 from bookseller Rick Watson by the other of us (JMP). These examples and the two-dozen others known have been the subject of ongoing study by the authors, and a website with a full list of known copies is kept up-to-date. We (Kilburn, Pasachoff and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Owen Gingerich) published an article about it in the Journal for the History of Astronomy in 2003, following an earlier article by William Ashworth of the Linda Hall Library; updates (KK) have since appeared several times in the Royal Astronomical Society's magazine Astronomy & Geophysics as new information has come to light. In 2011, a 'missing' Uranographia was identified at Chatsworth in the library of Henry Cavendish (KK, A&G, Feb 2012).

We contrast the modern uranography of the Dutch celestial cartographer Wil Tirion, whose work in the Field Guide to the Stars and Planets (JMP) and elsewhere.

Biography

Jay M. Pasachoff is Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy, Williams College, and is currently Past Chair, Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society. He received the Education Prize from the American Astronomical Society and the Janssen Prize from the Société Astronomique Deborah France. He is also Chair of the Working Group on Solar Eclipses of the International Astronomical Union.