Sun, Moon & Planets
Cassini's Moon
The first true map of the Moon — with a secret.
- Chart
- Carte de la Lune
- Astronomer
- Giovanni Domenico Cassini
- Date
- 1679
- Held by
- Paris Observatory · Linda Hall Library
Finish
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
In 1679 Cassini published the first accurate map of the Moon — twenty-one inches across, so finely engraved that its three-dimensional craters and seas went unsurpassed until photography itself. Drawn from nine years of observation at the terminator, where raking light throws every mountain into relief, it is a marvel. And hidden within it, a secret: at the Bay of Rainbows, a tiny "Moon Maiden," a woman's head with flowing hair, and in the Sea of Serenity a heart pierced like Cupid's dart — love letters, it is thought, to the wives of the mapmaker and his engraver, smuggled onto the surface of the Moon.
See it on your wall
A window onto the heavens, in your home
Cassini's Moon printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain chart held by Paris Observatory · Linda Hall Library — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on EMA matte art paper, 200gsm. Framed pieces sit in a box frame under acrylic, with no mount (gold-ink editions on specialist press).
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our charts cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the gold figures, the tiny stars, the cartouches — on a matte sheet that shows every line without glare.
