Globe of the sky with zodiac signs

For several dozen years the Wincenty Pola Manor House has been home to a collection of Polish-language globes of the Earth from the 19th to the 21st centuries (currently it is one of the largest in the country, numbering over one hundred and twenty specimens). However, as it happens with collections, they sometimes include objects that are exceptions to the accepted rule, which are impossible to resist. This is, for example, the case with the so-called otherworldly globes, such as the celestial globes. We have four of them in our collection; all were made outside our borders between 1790 and 2000, and only one has Polish nomenclature. They depict the brightest stars of both hemispheres of the celestial vault against the background of the coordinate system as well as stellar constellations (constellations) and galaxies and nebulae closer to us.

The presented globe is described in German. It was probably created in the 1890s in the Berlin publishing house of Ernst Schotte & Co. This publishing house started to operate in 1855, and from 1861 it began to publish globes of the Earth (including plastic ones), the sky, the Moon, as well as other instruments such as telluriums or planetariums. The brand's globes were published in various scales and frames in fifteen languages. They were exported to many European countries. The publishing house operated until the beginning of the 20th century.

This copy was donated to the Museum in 2008 by Dr Janina Ewa Piasecka (1928-2016). As a geographer she was connected to the University of Wrocław; in particular she dealt with the history of globe cartography. It was she who initiated the creation of the collection of globes in the Wincenty Pola Manor House.