The history of astronomical illustration will be discussed at the fifty sixth meeting of the Northern California History of Astronomy Luncheon and Discussion association, NCHALADA, on Saturday afternoon, February 10, 2001.

Remember that my sessions are always discussions, never lectures. Your contributions are eagerly welcomed.

A brief web tour of astronomical illustrations can be found at http://nchalada.org/illustr/contents.html

Pre-scientific drawings of things in the sky. Astrology will not be considered pre-scientific, I will lump it in with astronomy until the sixteenth century.

Drawings from the Eastern (India, China, Japan) traditions.

Pre-Hellenic Egypt, a different astrology.

Mesopotamia. Astrology as we know it begins here.

Greece. We will introduce the distinction between pictures (of things as they are seen) and schema (diagrams, graphs).

I'll likely skip Rome, unless someone brings something.

From the Muslim Empire, some schema that advanced beyond Ptolemy, and some pictures of constellations that include paintings of what the constellation was supposed to represent.

The early (pre-telescope) Renaissance schema of the Ptolemaic, Tychonian and Copernican universes.

The telescope changed everything. Details of the Moon and the planets were drawn for the first time. Mars especially was drawn with far more detail than actually existed.

Astrophotography changed it all again. Except for the planets, pictures waned while schema progressed. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is my canonical example of this.