Sign In

- Or use -
Forgot Password Create Account
Description

Unusual celestial map of the northern sky, published in Paris.

The map is shown on stereographic equatorial polar projection, showing the sky visible over the course of a year from a place in the northern hemisphere at a latitude of no less than 50°.

The constellations are shown, with the stars identified in five sizes as noted in the legend in the lower left corner, with distinct symbols for A Amas d'étoiles and N Nébuleuse. The main stars are named in French and, like almost all the others, by letters of the Greek alphabet according to Bayer's method.

Theophile Moreux (1867-1954) founded an observatory in Bourges, where he also served as professor of mathematics. He was an avid educator and creative thinker, and a member of the respected Légion d’honneur. Among his greatest interests was the vast expanse of space and its infinite possibilities, and he conducted detailed studies of the surfaces of both the moon and Mars. He also published a number of very popular star charts, as well as charts of the moon’s surface.

Among Moreux’s many celestial interests was the possibility of extraterrestrial life, in any form, although he rejected a popular theory of life on Mars that was prevalent at the time. He authored a number of popular science works that took on big questions like: What happens after death? Why are we here? And is there other life among the stars? These books had enormous popular appeal and with their foundations in science were widely acclaimed as important works of knowledge dissemination and philosophy.

In his most celebrated work, La Science Mystérieuse des Pharaons, Moreaux demonstrates how, in order to construct the great monuments they did, the ancient Egyptians had to have been able to calculate factors like the Earth’s density, the exact duration of a day and a year, and the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Following his death in 1954, an asteroid (14914) and a large Martian crater were named after him.