A “sky map” designed in the 19th century belonging to the Faculty of Astronomical and Geophysical Sciences of the National University of La Plata, and of which there are only 8 copies left in the world, it was restored by specialists from the University of San Martín and has already been delivered again to the house of studies in La Plata.
It is a planisphere of two meters by four in which you can see the constellations and the two hemispheres of the equinox of March 21, 1860, which it was designed by Antonio Torres Tirado, a history teacher who also taught astronomy, who printed a thousand copies and of which only eight remain.
Until the end of the 19th century, to teach astronomy, the heavens and atlases were painted on the domes and ceilings of schools.: This implied uneconomical work and not all schools had domes to paint, so this Map was a relatively inexpensive resource, since it was designed to be hung or glued to the ceilings.
As detailed by the Faculty of Astronomical Sciences of La Plata, thanks to the interdisciplinary work and the restoration of the Task-IIPC Center, School of Art and Heritage of the National University of San Martín (Unsam), the Faculty of Cs. Astronomy and Geophysics of the UNLP has one of the best preserved “sky maps” in the world.
The map was for many years hanging in the corridor of the building of the Faculty and before its deterioration was greater, the intervention of the Task Center, School of Art and Heritage of the National University of San Martín (Unsam) was decided, which finally delivered the restored map today.
Raúl Perdomo, dean of the Platense faculty He expressed that “the first thing we have to say to Unsam, to the dean of the Task-IIPC Center, Laura Malosetti and its members, is thank you very much. They have done a fantastic job, it is really surprising. This Map of the Sky was exhibited in a wall for decades. Over the years, it suffered a very significant deterioration. We had to take it to someone who knew how to restore it”.
The Director of the Faculty’s Museum of Astronomy and Geophysics, Sixto Giménez Benítez, He said that “at the beginning of 2000 the Map was already deteriorated and luckily the UNLP was able to make the effort to allocate funds to this recovery. In 2018 we visited Task and saw that it was the right place.”
Ana María Morales, who is a conservator-restorer of pictorial works at Unsam and was one of the restorers of the Sky Map that was in charge of the group of experts and students, explained that “like all objects that are big, the Map has that difficulty: it is big. One of the first things we did was organize a work methodology and one One of the first steps was to structure and organize part of the workshop to receive the map, deploy it and maneuver it”.
Morales added, “the map belongs to the Observatory Museum but what we do not know is how it got to the UNLP. There are some versions or oral comments that narrate that it may have come through Rey Pastor, a mathematician who was a professor at the University towards the beginning of the 20th century; either for the inauguration of the University in 1905 or when the princess of Asturias, Isabel de Borbón y Borbón, came to Argentina for the centenary of the foundation of Buenos Aires, in 1910″.
In 1898 Torres Tirado published a thousand lithographs of the map and the one for the Faculty is number 826, a number that was found on one of the pieces of wood that framed it.
There are 8 Sky Maps around the world and, Ramírez explained, “we know for a fact that in Latin America it is the only. There are 6 in Spain and one in Florence, Italy, which was tried to access to see its status but it was not possible. There are some copies that are not complete but only have the main circles of the constellations. It is almost certain that ours is the only integer; further dimension its historical value for the popularization of science”.
