The Sizes of the Heavenly Bodies

The heavens lined up by size, in 1660.

Chart: Harmonia Macrocosmica
Plate: Corporum Coelestium Magnitudines
Astronomer: Andreas Cellarius
Date: 1708 edition of 1660
Held by: Biblioteca comunale di Trento · via Wikimedia Commons

Corporum Coelestium Magnitudines

Format

The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

From Andreas Cellarius's Harmonia Macrocosmica, Amsterdam, 1660, in the 1708 issue by Gerard Valck and Pieter Schenk, the engraving credited to Jan van Loon. The title is three words, the magnitudes of the celestial bodies, and the plate does what its title says: it sets the bodies of the heavens side by side to compare their size, a picture still drawn in school books today. Cellarius was born Keller near Worms around 1596, Latinised his name, and from 1637 was rector of the Latin School at Hoorn. A schoolmaster's instinct shows here. He lined the heavens up like coins on a table, to see which was larger.

See it on your wall

A window onto the heavens, in your home

The Sizes of the Heavenly Bodies printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

The Sizes of the Heavenly Bodies framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain chart held by Biblioteca comunale di Trento · via Wikimedia Commons — 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.

From the same astronomer