Views of Heaven

Here’s a different kind of scavenger hunt for you when you visit the treasures of Harvard (see our story “Getting into Harvard” with the flash map tour). We’ve always found celestial globes fascinating, and apparently so has Harvard. Instead

of showing the land and ocean masses on a globe, these artful leaps of imagination show the constellations of the sky. Some of them actually contain useful information for navigators, like star elevations at certain times of the year. They also seem to capture the imaginations of different kinds of collectors. See if you can find at least three celestial globes in Harvard’s public displays. One’s in the map collection at Pusey — a beauty made by Gerard Mercator around 1600. Another is (naturally) part of the Historic Scientific Instruments Collection. And the third? It’s so lovely that it’s in the Fogg Museum as a work of art.

Posted by Patricia Harris and David Lyon, Globe Correspondents