Picture of the day

Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673) was a French Catholic priest and scientist. His celestial atlas, entitled Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio, comprised six charts of the night sky and was first published in 1674. The atlas uses a gnomonic projection so that the plates make up a cube of the celestial sphere. The constellation figures are drawn from Uranometria, but were carefully reworked and adapted to a broader view of the sky. This is the fifth plate from a 1693 edition of Pardies's atlas, featuring constellations including Lyra, Cygnus, Hercules, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius and Scorpius, Aquila, Delphinus, and Corona Australis, as well as Antinous, an obsolete constellation. All of these are visible in the Northern Hemisphere, though a few cross the boundary from the northern sky into the southern sky.Map credit: Ignace-Gaston Pardies