Nova Orbis Terrarum

Its imperial double-eagle design borrowed from a map made by Georg Braun in 1574, this world map by the German cartographer Philip Eckebrecht was created as a complement to astronomical tables published by Eckebrecht’s friend, Johannes Kepler, for the determination of longitude.

Star tables, used to record the position of planets in relation to fixed stars on any given date, were based on a geocentric (earth-centered) solar system until Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) demonstrated that the earth rotates around the sun. This revelation made previous star tables inherently flawed; but in 1551 a first attempt to compile star tables based on a heliocentric (stationary sun as the center) universe was also inaccurate.

Not until the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, and the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, did better tables become available. One essential ingredient was Kepler’s discovery that the planets follow an elliptical orbit; he also drew on Brahe’s observations of the heavens, and aided his calculations with logarithms. In 1627 the new, so-called Rudolphine Tables tables were published, named in honor of the late Holy Roman Emperor.

Eckebrecht’s map was created to be used in conjunction with these new tables. The map’s prime meridian is Uraniborg, Tycho Brahe’s observatory on the Swedish island of Ven.