Eight little moons ride the rim of a wheel of fine ruled lines

Plate 18 sets out the moon's motion as geometry. Eight numbered epicycles are spaced around a great circle, each a pale disc carrying a small moon shown in its phase — bisected, gibbous, full — and the whole is crossed by fine ruled lines lettered for the mean and true longitudes. A zodiac band in pink, blue and pale yellow rings the diagram with the twelve signs, and two small demonstration roundels sit in the lower corners. Putti fly in grey cloud around the edges, two of them holding the sea-green title banners.

Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596–1665) was a German-born Dutch cartographer and schoolmaster who spent most of his working life as rector of the Latin school in Hoorn. In 1660 the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius issued his Harmonia Macrocosmica, a folio atlas of twenty-nine engraved plates that set the competing world systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe beside charts of the constellations and the motions of the planets. It was the last great decorative celestial atlas of the Dutch golden age, and its hand-coloured plates — dense with putti, banners and allegorical figures — were reissued by Gerard Valk and Pieter Schenk in 1708. Copies are held by the Library of Congress, the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam and the Royal Astronomical Society.

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