Jamieson, Alexander. A celestial atlas: comprising a systemic display of the heavens in a series of thirty maps. London, 1822, pl. 25.

Further Out: Recent Acquisitions of Celestial Atlases

An Exhibition of Rare Books from the Collection of the Linda Hall Library And a Supplement to Out of This World

Jamieson, Alexander. A Celestial Atlas: Comprising a Systemic Display of the Heavens in a Series of Thirty Maps. London, 1822.

Alexander Jamieson was both author and artist for this attractive atlas. He says in his preface that the astronomer will perceive that “The plan of my work differs essentially from M. Bode’s Vorstellung der Gestirne”, but in fact it differs not at all, containing the same 27 plates as Bode’s atlas, with the same views and even the same plate numbers. The only addition to Bode is the color, and indeed, that does add a lot.

The Bode atlas that Jamieson built upon was not the 1782 edition, but rather the 1805 edition (Out of This World, item 32), which contained many new constellations, all of which Jamieson included in his own atlas. Jamieson did however invent a new constellation, or rather, transformed one new one into another. A French astronomer. Le Monnier, had earlier placed an exotic bird called the Solitaire on the tip of the tail of Hydra. It was included in the 1795 Paris edition of Flamsteed, but dropped in Bode’s Vorstellung of 1805. Jamieson put the bird back in, but changed it into “the sage looking Noctua, a bird which, considering the frequency it is met with on all Egyptian monuments, it appears strange our astronomers have not long ere this transferred among the celestials.”

Detail of the tail of Hydra, showing the Solitaire. Image source: Flamsteed, John. Atlas céleste. 3rd éd. Paris: Lamarche, 1795, pl. 19.

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Detail of the tail of Hydra, showing the Noctua. Image source: Jamieson, Alexander. A Celestial Atlas: Comprising a Systematic Display of the Heavens in a Series of Thirty Maps. London: G. & W.B. Whittaker..., 1822, pl. 27.

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Because Jamieson also colored in the constellation boundaries to make them stand out, we can notice an odd legacy of this Bode innovation. The Flamsteed star catalog (the basis for all the Flamsteed atlases, including Bode’s Vorstellung) had mistakenly placed some stars in the wrong constellations, so a star that should be in Lynx might be erroneously listed as a star of Ursa Major, or vice versa. Instead of correcting these obvious errors, Bode accommodated them, and so did Jamieson, and thus we can see several long fingers reaching down from the Great Bear and the Giraffe to pick up some stray stars in the Lynx, and another finger from Lynx stretching up to grab a star off of the chest of the Bear.

Leo Minor and Lynx. Image source: Jamieson, Alexander. A Celestial Atlas: Comprising a Systematic Display of the Heavens in a Series of Thirty Maps. London: G. & W.B. Whittaker..., 1822, pl. 5.

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