After many months of window shopping and screen drooling, I recently became a proud owner of two constellation maps by the excellent and charming artists at Stellavie, a design studio in Hamburg, Germany.
I went for the full set in gold & white, purchasing The Northern Sky and The Southern Sky maps as a pair. It's lovely having the two side-by-side for comparison, and it doesn't hurt that snagging the prints in a set saved me 35 euros. Better yet, they use PayPal which easily converted to USD without extra charges.
A close-up on Map 1 - The Northern Sky
The Stellavie team was kind enough to drop me an email inquiring how I found their work, and answered a couple of my questions on frame recommendations.
These prints are the first images I see most mornings, and it's a visually stunning reminder of the simultaneous immensity and minisculity of man. On the one hand, as Carl Sagan puts it, "...in a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty." But on the other, Sagan also says, "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another." Perhaps it is not our existence that is by any means special -- we are among the many starstuffs in this universe -- but it is our propensity to know and to create and to imprint starstuffs of our own imaginings that is remarkable.
Both prints taking residence on my bedroom wall
I'm very excited to see what Stellavie puts out next, and very much hoping it entails glow-in-the-dark as they've done with this neat print. Until then, I'll leave you with the entirety of an excerpt from Carl Sagan's Cosmos:
“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”