It was the most comprehensive celestial atlas of its time.
However, it was through the use of telescopes that Hevelius gained fame as the founder of lunar topography.
The surface of the Moon by Johannes Hevelius.
Johannes Hevelius was born in 1611 in Danzig, Poland.
His father owned a profitable brewery and wanted his son to become a businessman like himself.
At the age of 19, Hevelius went to study law at the University of Leiden.
In 1641, Hevelius constructed an observatory on the rooftops of three adjoining houses that he owned in Gdansk.
He filled this observatory with splendid instruments, ultimately including a large Keplerian telescope of 150 feet focal length.
Johannes Hevelius
One of Heveliuss first major undertakings was mapping of the moon.
Hevelius continued mapping the moon, producing copper engravings of every sketch he made.
At the end of five years, he had produced some 40 engraved plates.
Together they represents the first detailed, accurate maps of the moon’s surface.
Hevelius published them under the nameSelenographia.
Hevelius’s 150 feet focal-length telescope.
Hevelius also named dozens of features across the lunar landscape.
Hevelius and second wife Elisabeth observing the sky with a brass sextant.
In 1679, a tragic fire in his home and observatory destroyed all his instruments and books.
This manuscript is currently at Brigham Young University.
Johannes Hevelius died in 1687.
