What is in this collection
Celestial maps from the age when the sky was still drawn by hand and the shape of the universe was still argued over on paper. At the centre of the collection stands Andreas Cellarius and his Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660: the system of Ptolemy, the system of Copernicus, the compromise offered by Tycho Brahe, the old constellations of Aratus, and a sky redrawn with Christian figures in place of the pagan ones. Beside them sits Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr's Tabula Selenographica of 1702, a map of the Moon. Every plate is engraved, hand coloured, and restored from a library original whose archive, shelfmark and year are stated on the map's own page.
How to choose a map of stars and constellations
By what the sheet argues. The system plates each draw a different universe and read as a set on one wall — Ptolemy against Copernicus against Brahe is an argument you can hang. The Christianised sky and the lunar sheet are single subjects and stand alone. By the drawing, if that is what decides it: these plates are dense and mythological, crowded with figures, cartouches and putti, closer to a painting than to a diagram. One thing worth saying plainly — these are historical sheets, not a personalised star map of the sky on your own date.
What you get
Each map is delivered as six separate downloads, so you take only the shape your frame needs: the full sheet with its margins, a version trimmed to the plate border, and four crops — 3:2, 4:3, 5:4 and ISO A. Every download is a ZIP holding one JPEG at 300 dpi in sRGB, the restoration passport as a PDF, and a short read-me. The passport is open on the product page before you buy, not only after: it states the measurements, the source, and what was deliberately left alone.
Restoration
Every map is a scan of a real sheet held in a named archive — library, shelfmark and year, all stated. Nothing generated, nothing redrawn. Stains, dirt and scanner cast come out; the grain of the paper, the hand colour and the engraved line stay exactly as the plate printed them.