Celestial chart
Anthoine de Fer (fl. 1645-50)
Paris, 1650
Handcolored engraving
WOP-234b

De Fer appears to have taken his constellations from his contemporary Melchior Tavernier who happened to have a shop near de Fer's on one of the quays along the Seine River in Paris. However, for some reason de Fer reversed Tavernier's description of the Northern Hemisphere, drawing the constellation figures as if seen from the back and projected on to a geocentric star map. De Fer's manipulation of Tavernier's charts is further complicated by his failure to reverse the Southern Hemisphere, so the overall work contains a set of mismatched planispheres.