Grienberger, Christoph. Catalogus veteres affixarum longitudines ac latitudines conferens cum novis. Rome, 1612.
Christoph Grienberger was professor of astronomy at the Jesuit College in Rome. His star atlas, published just nine years after Bayer’s Uranometria (Out of This World, item 9), continued the Bayer tradition of utilizing the best available star catalogs as a basis for his star maps. Grienberger relied mostly on Tycho Brahe (as had Bayer), but added to it observations by a fellow Jesuit, Christoph Clavius, and by Franciscus Pissero. His maps, 25 in all, were constructed on what is called the gnomonic projection, where a sphere is projected onto a cube and then (in this case) but up into smaller sections showing two or three constellations each. The constellation figures are classical, i.e., the figures are mostly nude, and are ultimately derived from the figures on Dürer’s star maps of 1515.
The map showing Hydra, Crater, and Corvus is one of the last attempts to display the constellation Hydra on one plate, since it extends over nearly 90 degrees of sky. Bayer had also shown the complete serpent, but he put Crater and Corvus on separate plates. Since all three constellations derive from the same myth concerning Apollo and the Crow, it is nice to have them all together here.
Grienberger’s atlas was quite accurate and up-to-date (it was, for example, the first atlas to depict the new star of 1604). It was not, however, widely distributed; many later star atlas compilers seem to be unaware of its existence, and it is now one of the scarcest of all important atlases, which only three known copies in the United State.