The Stars, in Six Maps, on the Gnomonic Projection by Sir John Lubbock c1860

LUBBOCK, Sir John William; DAYMAN, Rev. Charles Orchard. The Stars, in Six Maps, on the Gnomonic Projection.
 
Designed and constructed by Sir John William Lubbock, Bart., and published under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. New Edition, revised by the Rev. W. R. Dawes, F.R.A.S., containing all the objects in Admiral Smyth’s Cycle of Celestial Objects.
 
London: Edward Stanford, 6 & 7 Charing Cross, [c.1860].
 
Large folio (approx. 470 × 380 mm). Complete with printed front wrapper, title page, explanatory letterpress, six large engraved celestial maps on the gnomonic projection, each hand-coloured in outline, and printed rear wrapper. Original blue printed wrappers, now worn with edge tears, losses, creasing and general fragility; the leaves all loose as issued. The title and explanation leaves browned, with small edge tears and creases; paper brittle but text complete. The six maps in good to very good condition: clean impressions, attractive hand-colouring as issued, occasional marginal splits or creases, but no major loss to the engraved image areas. Overall a complete survival in original issue state, with all components present.
 
The gnomonic projection, in which all great circles appear as straight lines, was adopted by Lubbock to allow the relative positions of stars and constellations to be visualised in a geometrically rigorous manner, particularly useful for understanding celestial navigation and the apparent paths of bodies across the sphere. First issued in 1844 under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, these maps were revised for this “New Edition”, incorporating corrections and additions from the Astronomical Society’s catalogues and from Admiral William Henry Smyth’s Cycle of Celestial Objects, one of the most important mid-nineteenth-century observational surveys.
 
Complete sets in original wrappers, retaining both the explanatory text and all six hand-coloured charts, are distinctly uncommon.