Exhibits in the Lisbon Maritime Museum

[baggywrinkle]

On my travels again for work. I arrived in Lisbon and made for the Maritime Museum not expecting to see such a great array of navigational instruments from the 1400-1500's. I should have thought again, Portugal was a major sea faring nation with Vasco De Gama the first westerner to circumnavigate the world.

The museum has a fantastic collection of original and reconstructions of navigating instruments from that period and it makes you think that it was a step off the edge as longitude was far from being accurate.

I now know the origin of the word armillary in relation to the armillary sphere....

The Dutch 16th Century celestial globe was stunning, the lighting was not good for photography but I have tweaked the images to make them clearer. The southern hemisphere constellations are not what we know today. Fluvius (Euphrates) became Eridanus, Apus the Bee became Musca the Fly.

Next door is the Lisbon Planetarium, I did not go in but I did buy a repro astrolabe...