The Spiral Motions of the Planets

The wandering planets, traced as hypnotic looping spirals.

Chart: Atlas Novus Coelestis
Plate: Motus in Coelo Spirales
Astronomer: Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr
Date: 1742
Held by: Published Nuremberg · Bibliothèque nationale de France

Motus in Coelo Spiralesas engraved 1742

Finish

Format

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

Size

$29.00

The story

Watched from a moving Earth, the planets do not simply circle — they loop, double back, and trace strange rosettes across the sky. Doppelmayr set out to draw those true apparent paths, and the result is one of the strangest and most beautiful diagrams in the whole atlas tradition: Venus and Mercury winding about the Sun in hypnotic spirals, pure geometry standing in for the wandering of worlds. Where other plates show the heavens as they are believed to be, this one shows the dizzying way they actually appear — mathematics rendered as ornament.

See it on your wall

A window onto the heavens, in your home

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

The Spiral Motions of the Planets framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain chart held by Published Nuremberg · Bibliothèque nationale de France — 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