 employed various engravers to work on the plates of the atlas, but only two have signed their work: Frederik Hendrik van den Hove is author of the frontispiece, and Johannes van Loon, who engraved ten charts. All of the designs of the classical constellations were taken from the ones created by Dutch Mannerist artist and engraver Jan Pieterszoon Saenredam (1565-1607). The current chart, which appears as Plate Three in the atlas, is signed by van Loon. 

This map was engraved by Johannes van Loon, who drew heavily upon Ptolemy's model of the planetary sphere. 

The diagram shows the movement of the Moon, seven planets, and the Sun around the Earth. The Earth, centred on the Americas, floats in the middle of the Cosmos, surrounded by an oblique ‘circulus aequintoctalis’ (or the ‘Great Circle’ the smaller band depicted in red) and the Zodiac ring. In the lower left-hand corner, a simplified diagram of the 'Hypothesis Ptolemaica' ('Ptolemaic Hypothesis') appears, with the 'Hypothesis Brahea' in the right-hand corner. The latter illustrates 

's model of the Universe, a map of which also appears in Cellarius's celestial atlas, 'Harmonia Macrocosmica'.

The Sunderland Collection

Andreas Cellarius’s stunning ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’, was the only celestial atlas produced during a celebrated era of Dutch publishing between 1570 and 1670. It is quite possibly the finest celestial atlas ever realised.

This is one of twenty-one sumptuous Baroque-style charts that majestically represent the three competing astronomical models of the day: the Ptolemaic, Tychonic, and the Copernican.

The Earth, centred on the Americas, floats in the middle of the cosmos, surrounded by an oblique ‘Circulus Aequintoctalis’, surrounded by the ‘sphaera’ of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The outermost ring is the Zodiac, which intersects with a smaller red ring labelled 'Circulus Aequintoctalis'. Where this ring meets the Zodiac are the two points representing the two Equinoxes, where night and day are the same length.

This map was included in Andreas Cellarius’s magnum opus, ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’, published in 1660 by Johannes Janssonius, who in the same year also included the work as the last volume in his own ‘Atlas Maior’.

Andreas Cellarius’s representation of the Ptolemaic geocentric theory of the Cosmos, with the Earth at the centre of a planetary sphere, showing the planetary orbits.

Cellarius's Map of the Ptolemaic Planetary Spheres