Riedig, C. G. Himmels-Atlas in 20 Blättern nach den grossen Bodenschen Sternkarten. Leipzig, [1849].
The Riedig star atlas is the third of our recent acquisitions to be patterned after Bode’s Uranographia of 1801, and it is by far the smallest of the three (the other two are the atlases by Meissner and Green, exhibit items 7 and 11). Each Bode plate has been reduced by a factor of 48 to produce these tiny illustrations. The glory of the Riedig atlas is the delicate blue outline shading, which makes the constellations almost rise up off the page.
The illustration above displays Cetus and the river Eridanus, as well as several more recent constellations at the bottom. Fornax and Sculptor were invented by Lacaille and are still used; Machina electrica, invented by Bode in celebration of the great static electrical generators of the eighteenth century, has been discarded.
The northern polar constellations (below) include Ursa Minor, Draco, Camelopardalis, and Cepheus. The small reindeer and the shepherd (Tarandus and Messium) were late eighteenth-century inventions and are now obsolete.
The two illustrations below allow us to compare a Bode original and a Riedig copy. The Riedig plate of Leo and Cancer is close to natural size (left), but the Bode plate (right) has been greatly reduced.