TO PARAPHRASE astronomer Carl Sagan, there are one hundred billion galaxies, each containing one hundred billion stars, in our “vast and awesome universe.” Accepting the existence of something so incomprehensible is nearly tantamount to believing in God, and, much like that human yearning to know a Supreme Being, our attempts to understand the cosmos date back millennia. Cosmigraphics’ compilation of images of our solar system, our galaxy, and the whole enchilada ranges from Ptolemy’s geocentric conception, from AD 150, to maps so specialized that they only record, for instance, the spectral wavelengths of hydrogen in space. Johannes Kepler’s 1595 drawing of the celestial spheres physicalizes the solar system as a sculptural contraption of nesting doll-like orbs; more than four hundred years later, a map generated by an infrared space telescope articulates the Milky Way’s grand spiral with a delicacy that suggests a piece of jewelry—a Victorian-style brooch, perhaps. Contemporary technology may render the unseen viewable, but it remains not quite comprehensible: A 2010 supercomputer simulation of star formation uses “velocity streamlines” to “map the kinetic dynamics of baryonic matter flows.”
Picturing space before the advent of the telescope necessarily called on the imagination, particularly its spiritual dimension, to fill in for a lack of hard data. That lack also directed visual thinking to things terrestrial. One fifteenth-century image created by Giovanni di Paolo to illuminate a manuscript of The Divine Comedy shows a domesticated cosmos populated by recognizable scenes and figures—people plowing, people fishing, animals. Arab cosmographer Zakariya’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini envisioned an angel holding the celestial realm aloft (it looks like one of Jasper Johns’s target paintings) among the clouds. How the universe might be reduced to the size of a pizza and floated handily within easy sight of earthbound folks is a riddle not to be solved. Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi charted another version of the sky world in 964: A medieval edition of his illustrated text Book of Fixed Stars offers a depiction of the constellation Gemini (above) in the quite corporeal embodiment of Castor and Pollux. With their fiery badges demarcating stars, and the synced-up choreography of a Busby Berkeley routine, the twins are chorus-line dancers stepping lively across the heavens. On the death of Castor, Greek myth tells us, Pollux asked Zeus to join them together forever; the god granted the request by giving the brothers an eternal stage in the empyrean. When we look to the planets and stars—regardless of their distance and immensity—we have always seen ourselves, our stories. The universe, these images tell us, is really no more than the size of a pen and its page.
