Antinous on Mercator’s globe
Antinous with Aquila the eagle hovering closely above as shown on a globe of 1551 by the Dutch cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–94). Here he is seen face-on, rather than side-on as in Caspar Vopel’s earlier depiction. Antinous consisted of six stars, as assigned to it by Ptolemy in the Almagest. We now know these stars as Eta, Theta, Delta, Iota, Kappa, and Lambda Aquilae. Because this is a globe, the constellations appear reversed left-to-right from the Earth-based view.
(Image: Harvard Map Collection)
