54 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2019
more. A real education could be gotten
from these miniature cards.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
John Player & Sons produced a set of 25
cards called “Those Pearls of Heaven,” show-
ing the brightest constellations.
They include Orion, Leo,
Taurus, and even small finder
star charts. The back of the card
“Bears — Great and Little”
explains: “Part of the Great Bear is
the familiar Plough, also called
Charles’s Wain. Between the Pointers
is the Owl Nebula invisible to the
unaided eye.” (Before you write in, I
realize that last statement is a mistake.
M97 isn’t between the Pointers.)
These cards ref lect the astronomical
knowledge of their time. A card by
Wills Cigarettes shows a face-on spiral
nebula — in other words, a galaxy. The
back states it consists of “highly diffused
gaseous matter, thought to have been
expelled from the Milky Way.”
Mars is shown with a spider’s web of
canals, while its surface is crisscrossed by
waterways under a blue martian sky. The
same set also illustrates volcanoes forming
lunar craters. An illustration of an eclipse
viewed from the Moon indicates a lunar
surface that is sharp and craggy.
Many cards became small works of
art in their own right. One card shows
Halley’s Comet shining in a star-filled
sky above a calm lake. Others feature
polar explorers trudging over ice fields
under the glow of the aurora australis
and a fireball blazing across a darkened
sky. Equipment like the Yerkes’ refractor
or a brass spectroscope also appear on
these cards.
Even the Zeiss projector at the London
Planetarium appears on a Tonibell lemon
juice card. Astronomers Sir Robert Ball,
Hans Lipperhey, and Sir Isaac Newton
also have places in these miniatureI have had lots of experience with astronomical
ephemera. My wife and I once went to Lowell
Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, on a rescue
mission. The observatory was clearing out a
mountain of material related to the failed
Astrographic Sky Survey, first instituted by the
observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, at the
start of the 20th century. There were thou-
sands of photographic star charts taken by
observatories from around the world.
When I began sorting through all of this,
I ran across an envelope addressed to
“Professor Percival Lowell, 53 State St.,
Boston, Mass.” The postmark shows that
it was sent from Flagstaff on March 12,
1907, at 4 P. M. It contained
a single sheet of
paper listing a
number of charts
and nothing more.
This bit of ephemera,
which speaks of
a grand human
endeavor, went
unnoticed for more
than a century. — R.S.HIDDEN FOR DECADES