Astrolabe Catalogue Home Page

Notes on the Astrolabe Catalogue

This part of the MHS astrolabe site provides a fully-illustrated catalogue of all the astrolabes held at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. As well as viewing its comprehensive set of images for each instrument, you can also perform advanced searches to discover, for example, all the astrolabes with a particular star on their rete, or every instrument which lists a particular town in a gazetteer.

Click on Browse Astrolabes or Search Astrolabes in the menu above to access the astrolabes from any catalogue page.

Most of the images in the catalogue can be clicked in order to view a larger version. In some cases, where the image is particularly large, it may be necessary, depending on the web browser being used, to click again to view the image at its full size.

Please note that this web catalogue makes heavy use of Unicode fonts in order to display Arabic, Greek, Sanskrit and other scripts and in order to display Roman transliterations of Arabic characters. Users who do not have Unicode fonts installed on their machines may experience difficulty displaying some characters. Users with the Internet Explorer browser running under Windows should install the Arial Unicode MS font for maximum Unicode compatibility. Users using the Firefox browser will typically be able to display the Unicode fonts without taking any other action.

Unfortunately there is no way to display the non-Roman characters that avoids the need for Unicode font(s) to be installed on the end user's machine.

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