The Spiral Path of the Sun

A year of the Sun's days, wound into one coil around the Earth.

Chart: Harmonia Macrocosmica
Plate: Solis circa Orbem Terrarum Spiralis Revolutio
Astronomer: Andreas Cellarius
Date: 1708 edition of 1660
Held by: Biblioteca comunale di Trento · via Wikimedia Commons

Solis circa Orbem Terrarum Spiralis Revolutio

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, reissued in 1708 by Gerard Valck and Pieter Schenk. The title: the spiral revolution of the Sun around the Earth. In an Earth-centred sky the Sun does not run one neat circle. It climbs toward one tropic through half the year and sinks toward the other through the rest, so that its daily turns, traced together, wind a spiral between the two. The plate draws that coil. It is the geocentric astronomy at its most graceful, and a motion a turning, tilted Earth later explained away in a sentence. The coil stays beautiful all the same.

See it on your wall

A window onto the heavens, in your home

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

The Spiral Path of the Sun 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