Celestials

F.G.Deschamps Paris 1776

copper engraved map with hand colouring; image size 17,5 x 22,5 cm, paper size 22 x 26 cm. fold as issued; indistinctive platemark; shaved to left and top platemark; some discolouration; additional printer’s crease; o/w g cond.

French edition of Flamsteed’s celestial atlas, showing the Zodiacs and other celestial constellations.

Flamsteed was an English astronomer and was appointed the first Astronomer Royal who catalogued over 3000 stars. – From an early age on, he was very interested in astronomy and in 1665, at the age of nineteen, he wrote his first paper on this subject, ‘Mathematical Essays’. In 1670, he became an undergraduate at Jesus College in Cambridge, and later became a deacon. In March 1675, he was called to London and was appointed ‘the King’s Astronomical Observator’ with an annual allowance of £100. In June 1675, a Royal Warrant granted the founding of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and in August, Flamsteed laid the foundation stone. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1676, and eventually moved into the Observatory where he lived until 1684 when he was appointed priest to the parish of Burstow, Surrey. He lived there until his death in 1719. – Flamsteed spent 40 years observing and cataloguing stars for his own ‘star catalogue’ but, afraid to risk his reputation, he kept his findings under lock in Greenwich where they were discovered and published by Newton in 1712 in a pirated star catalogue. Flamsteed, himself uncertain of his findings, obtained 300 of the 400 copies and burned them. – In 1725, his version of ‘Historia Coelestis Britannica’ was published posthumously, containing his own observations of almost 3000 stars with greater accuracy than any other previously known work. in 1729, his wife Margaret published his’ Atlas Coelestis’, followed by a French edition. – One of the moon craters has been named after Flamsteed as well as an asteroid.