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This intriguing engraving records the appearance of the brilliant comet C/1652 Y1, first noticed in mid-December 1652 and soon visible throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Three horizontal registers at left chart the comet’s nightly progress against the constellations between 14 and 26 December, each vignette framed by banks of low winter clouds and annotated with the relevant dates. A small azimuth diagram in the bottom margin fixes the celestial scenes to the terrestrial compass.
The right-hand column compares the newcomer’s apparent magnitude with an ordinary star: a bright, six-pointed “Gemeiner Stern” hovers above an enormous solar-disk-like circle whose radial hatching evokes a dazzling corona, while a long, textured tail encloses the upper left quadrant. The caption explains that the circle gives the comet’s “ungefehre größe … wie der selbe gegen gemeine Sterne anzusehen,” an arresting visual metaphor for the body’s exceptional brilliance.
Issued from the Merian workshop in Frankfurt, the print formed part of the news-serial material that Caspar and Matthäus Merian the Younger supplied to readers of the Theatrum Europaeum and other contemporary compilations. Its careful plotting of the comet’s path reflects the growing interest among German astronomers in positional accuracy after the publication of Kepler’s Tabulae Rudolphinae and anticipates Hevelius’s more detailed observations of the 1652–53 apparition.
