A map of the Milky Way galaxy in the style of a 16th century cartographer
I was looking for maps of our galaxy, and realised I couldn’t really find any. There are plenty of diagrams and artists impressions, but all focus in showing what our galaxy would actually look like from above. All very literal, all very useful, but all… pretty unimaginative.
The art of cartography has seemingly been forgotten in this modern age of cosmic exploration. We hypothesise about the shape of our galaxy much as we once argued about the shape of our continents, but we’ve left behind the artistic flare that once came with such speculation.
So here I have attempted to channel the geographers of the first Age of Exploration, and make a map of our galaxy in their style.
It includes the major and minor spiral arms, our two satellite galaxies (the Magellanic clouds), and the position and path of our Sun. It also has the Galactic Bulge (‘Tumor Galaxae’) and the Galactic Bar (‘Sera Galaxae’).
It also shows the Zone of Obscuration (Zona Occulta), the area hidden behind the galactic centre. Much like the shape of Australia to 16th and 17th century map-makers, the nature of this region of the galaxy is basically guess-work. Canny readers may spot “Hic sunt dracones” there; I’ll let you guess what that means.
The image is entirely in Latin of course, as was the style at the time. I had some help with this, as I know very little Latin myself.
In the title of the map I’ve also translated my name, Ryan Starkey, into Latin: Regulus Stellaclavis. Ryan is from an Irish word meaning king, plus a diminutive suffix, so “Regulus” words as a perfect translation. Meanwhile Star+key can give us Stella+clavis in Latin.
Here’s a more useful, if less artistic image of our Galaxy for comparison.
And here’s Gerardus Mercator’s map of the North Pole from 1595, which was a major inspiration for my map:
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