This map was published by the German Erhard Weigel, a professor of mathematics at the University of Jena, the day before the total eclipse of 12 August 1654, as part of a university exercise The Second Treatise of the Second Part of *Geoscopia Selenitarum* on Eclipses.

The map shows the Earth’s hemisphere as a disc on which only Europe, Africa, Western Asia and small parts of the Americas are visible. In the northern hemisphere, there is a line running from North America, through Europe, to India, marked as Via Umbræ Lunæ, which traces the projected path of the solar eclipse. Weigel estimated that the eclipse would last longest on the Crimean Peninsula.

Weigel used the Rudolphine Tables, which Johannes Kepler had published in 1627 based on Tycho Brahe’s observations, to carry out the calculations and determine the path of the eclipse with great precision.

This engraving had been forgotten until the historian Klaus-Dieter Herbst rediscovered it in 2010 and identified it as the oldest known map depicting the calculated path of a solar eclipse across the Earth’s surface, sixty years before Edmond Halley did so in 1715, to whom this achievement had long been attributed.

Sources

• On Eclipses, both in general and specifically on the Great Solar Eclipse due to take place on 2 August