<p style='text-align: justify;'>Johannes Bayer (1572-1625) was educated at the University of Ingolstadt and became legal advisor to the City Council of Augsburg in 1612. The illustrated celestial atlas, the <i>Uranometria</i>, was sponsored by the humanist-patrician, Marc Welser (1558-1614) and published in Augsburg in 1603. It contains twenty-nine maps of the sky engraved by Alexander Mair (c. 1559-1617) showing about 2,000 stars. The book is dedicated to leaders of the City Council of Augsburg. In his address to the reader, Bayer explains that he wished to rectify the confusion caused by the plethora of names for stars since antiquity. In particular, the book takes account of descriptions from Hipparchus, Ptolemy, the <i>Alphonsine Tables</i>, and Copernicus collated by Tycho Brahe (and circulating in manuscript form at the time), which Bayer had studied carefully. Bayer shows no interest in engaging with the different cosmological theories of his time. This is a typically humanist work seeking to establish a proper correspondence between 'names and things'. Some copies feature both the figures and accompanying text, while the images and words are separated into two volumes in other instances. In addition to the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations, <i>Uranometria</i> features twelve new constellations of the southern skies and two planispheres giving an overview of the northern and southern hemispheres, respectively. Each engraving is framed with celestial co-ordinates and includes lines for the equinoctial circles, a shaded band for the zodiac, and a dotted region for the Milky Way in the background. Constellations are presented in their classical forms 'for the lovers of antiquity'. These figures made the book 'well suited for playing the humanistic parlor game of deciphering iconographic concepts', according to Volker Remmert. Each star is allotted a Greek letter, followed by Latin letters, collated with the traditional numbers. In a legend for each table, Bayer gave all the known names of a given constellation, and grouped the stars according to their magnitude. This plate shows the constellation of Pegasus. Stars in the constellation are represented by different symbols according to their apparent magnitude. Basing his work on the star catalogues of Tycho Brahe and others, Bayer assigned the brightest stars in each constellation a letter from the Greek alphabet, with alpha being the brightest, beta the second brightest, and so on. These letters form the basis of the Bayer designation system today. Each of Bayer's constellation plates was bordered by scales which allowed the determination of the position of stars to half a degree. Significant meridians and parallels were also marked, along with the zodiac, represented by the shaded area at the bottom of this plate. Thus, while the constellation figures in the atlas are beautiful, the atlas was also a useful reference work.</p>
