The three-dimensional quality given to the lunar features by Patigny and Mellan remained unsurpassed until the advent of photography. Both the technology and the observations made were so exciting that a manuscript map of lunar features appears in a 1680 painting at Versailles by Henri Testelin, showing Colbert introducing members of the Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV. The copperplate for the map, engraved by Claude Mellan, was created with the help of the drawings. Fifty-seven of these drawings remain in the library of the Paris Observatory. The observations took place when possible during lunar eclipses, which provided unusual light patterns and a clearer view of the surface. Cassini ordered a 34-foot telescope from the great instrument maker Giuseppe Campani for the new observatory, which would prove to be crucial in the creation of his lunar map.Ĭassini made approximately sixty drawings of the moon between 16, with the assistance of the artists Sebastien Leclerc and Jean Patigny. In 1669, he moved to France on the invitation of Colbert to help set up and become the first director of the new Paris Observatory. The elder Cassini was born in Liguria, and studied at the Panzano Observatory under Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi. Jean-Dominique Cassini, known as Cassini IV, (1748–1845) was born at the observatory in Paris which his great-grandfather, also called Jean-Dominique Cassini, (1625–1712) had founded. The first state of Cassini IV’s reissue of his great-grandfather’s rare and “elegant” lunar map.
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