The sun carries Mercury and Venus around a fixed earth

Plate 6 lays out Tycho Brahe's compromise: the earth stays still at the centre with the moon circling it, while the sun — a gold face in a ring of rays at the top of the sheet — carries Mercury and Venus around with it, and the circles of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn enclose them all. A zodiac ring in pale pink, cream and green segments runs round the outside with the twelve signs. Astronomers sit at the lower left among globes; at the lower right Tycho himself sits in a ruffed collar and red hose while an assistant holds up a small gilt quadrant, a terrestrial globe and an armillary sphere at their feet, with ruined classical masonry behind. This copy carries rose-pink swagged banners and the Amsterdam imprint of Gerard Valk and Pieter Schenk.

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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