Kevin J. Kilburn

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John Bevis's star atlas, technically unpublished but available mid-18th-century, ranks with Bayer's 1603 Uranographia, Hevelius's 1690 Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia, Flamsteed's Atlas Coelestis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

Kevin J. Kilburn is Vice President, Manchester Astronomical Society, and is currently Acting Chairman, the Society for the History of Astronomy. His discovery of the Manchester Astronomical Society's copy of the Bevis atlas has led to the decades-long investigation of all the Bevis atlases and unpublished versions and plates around the world. The Cosmological Compass in Western Art.