Out of this World

For millennia, people have attempted to capture the wonder of the heavens, to make the movements of the stars and planetary objects comprehensible to ordinary minds. One method was the armillary sphere — a model of the heavens featuring a central globe within a framework of rings representing celestial bodies.

The Geography and Map Division’s oldest globe, and one of its rarest, is an armillary sphere created by Caspar Vopel in 1543. The German mathematician and geographer operated a prominent workshop that produced celestial and terrestrial globes, armillary spheres, sundials, quadrants and astrolabes. Nine of his globes are known to exist today, including the exquisite example held by the Library.

The Library’s armillary sphere consists of a terrestrial globe only 3 inches in diameter, bearing a hand-drawn map with names of regions written in red and the location of important cities marked with red dots. Geographers of the era weren’t certain whether the Americas and Asia were the same continent or separate landmasses; Vopel drew his globe showing the two landmasses connected.

The globe is contained within 11 interlocking armillary rings that illustrate the rotation of the sun, moon and stars in the Ptolemaic tradition, with the Earth at the center of the universe. The rings include the equator, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the equinoxes, the polar circles and the ecliptic circle of the sun. Some of the rings move and could be used to demonstrate the movement of the stars during different seasons.

Ironically, this globe was produced the same year Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric model of the universe, which mathematically proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, revolutionizing the way humans saw their place in the universe.