Schiaparelli’s Beautiful Canali
Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 6:25PM 
For those of you without at least a passing interest in Martian cartography, Giovanni Schiaparelli was one of the first astronomer's to map Mars using a halfway decent telescope. He drew exceedingly detailed maps of what he saw, depicting massive, linear trenches he called canali. He firmly believed these were too straight to be formed by any natural process, and that they must have been artificially produced by inhuman minds (perhaps even cool and unsympathetic ones). His maps were the state of the art for about 20 years. BibliOdyssey has a wonderful post showing some of Schiaparelli's maps, which are far more beautiful than I had imagined, having previously only seen crude reproductions in 2-tone print. Wonderful stuff. Via The Map Room
Reader Comments (2)
Those are beautiful. Thanks for the links to the Map Room.
Glad you like it. Be sure to check out too. That's gotta be one of the coolest blogs for people who like really old pieces of paper (i.e. people like us).