The Systems of the World
The Long Telescope
An aerial telescope from the Star Castle in Gdańsk.
- Chart
- Machinae Coelestis
- Plate
- Machinae Coelestis, Fig. AA
- Astronomer
- Johannes Hevelius
- Date
- 1673
- Held by
- Houghton Library, Harvard University · via Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
Figure AA from Machinae Coelestis, the book of celestial machines Johannes Hevelius published in 1673; this copy is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The figure belongs among the aerial telescopes, the long Keplerian kind. Hevelius built his observatory in 1641 across the roofs of his three connected houses in Gdańsk, the Star Castle, and in the end equipped it with a Keplerian telescope 46 metres long, in a tube of wood and wire. Six years after this book, on September 26, 1679, fire took the observatory, the instruments and the books. The machines survive on paper, and nowhere else.
See it on your wall
A window onto the heavens, in your home
The Long Telescope 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 Houghton Library, Harvard University · 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.
