Star chart

The oldest known star chart may be a carved ivory Mammoth tusk, drawn by early people from Asia who moved into Europe, that was discovered in Germany in 1979.

[3] German researcher Dr Michael Rappenglueck, of the University of Munich, has suggested that drawing on the wall of the Lascaux caves in France could be a graphical representation of the Pleiades open cluster of stars.

[4] Rappenglueck also discovered a drawing of the Northern Crown constellation in the cave of El Castillo (North of Spain), made in the same period as the Lascaux chart.

[5] Another star chart panel, created more than 21,000 years ago, was found in the La Tête du Lion cave (fr).

[6] A star chart drawn 5000 years ago by the Indians in Kashmir, which also depict a supernova for the first time in human history.

[8] The earliest known star catalogues were compiled by the ancient Babylonian astronomers of Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC, during the Kassite Period (ca.

[12] A Roman era example of a graphical representation of the night sky is the Ptolemaic Egyptian Dendera zodiac, dating from 50 BC.

It was most likely produced in Vienna, Austria in 1440 and consisted of a two-part map depicting the constellations of the northern celestial hemisphere and the ecliptic.

This may have served as a prototype for the oldest European printed star chart, a 1515 set of woodcut portraits produced by Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg, Germany.

[18] The latter was the first atlas to chart both celestial hemispheres and it introduced the Bayer designations for identifying the brightest stars using the Greek alphabet.

They are illustrations based on Alexander Jamieson's A Celestial Atlas, but the addition of holes punched in them allowed them to be held up to a light to see a depiction of the constellation's stars.