It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that is what will first strike the reader. Open this book and if you can prise yourself away from its wonderful marbled end papers, with their swirls and drifts of deepest blue, brilliant flashes of rusty orange, rivulets of ochre, inky spheres and floating masses of fiery red, you will find yourself taken back to the Enlightenment world of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlasand an age in which Europe’s polymaths were as interested in the discoveries of science as they were in the literary and artistic culture of the day.

The Atlas Coelestis, published in 1742, is an extraordinary work consisting of 30 plates illustrating everything that was known of the cosmos at the time. Phaenomena reproduces these plates in double-page spreads, and then again in detail so that each part can be clearly seen. Giles Sparrow introduces and explains each plate, decoding the charts and diagrams which in the original are annotated in Latin. Interleaved with the Dopplemayr plates is a wide variety of further illustrations, making the book a comprehensive guide to the history of astronomy from Aristotle to the Hubble telescope, touching on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, Islamic and many other sources en route. Its main focus, however, is the period between the revolutionary heliocentric ideas of Nicholas Copernicus early in the 16th century, gradually and reluctantly adopted by other astronomers, and the work of Doppelmayr’s contemporaries some 200 years later.

Doppelmayr came from an affluent merchant family in Nuremberg, a city that was a hub of scientific thinking, precision instrument-making and astronomy. From 1704 he was professor of mathematics in Altdorf, just outside Nuremberg, and remained there his entire life, devoting himself to the popularising of current scientific theory. His association from early in his career with the publisher Johann Baptist Homann, a former Dominican monk and map engraver, was the key to a steady series of maps and books, beginning with a map of the eclipse seen across Europe in May 1706 and culminating in the Atlas Coelestis that Sparrow has brought to life here.

This is a book ultimately as accessible to the non-scientist as it is to the specialist. Doppelmayr’s mathematical notations of the motions of the planets, the charts of loops, parabolas and ellipses might at first seem a baffling panorama of unknowing. With Sparrow’s help, however, they give up a story of increasing fascination. Take the development of heliocentric theory. Before Copernicus, with the odd exception, the Earth was thought to be the unmoving point at the centre of a revolving universe, a system apparently endorsed in the Book of Joshua, where God makes the orbiting sun stand still. Doppelmayr gives us the charts that demonstrate how successive astronomers struggled to uphold a geocentric cosmos while acknowledging the merit of the Copernican idea. Increasingly complicated theories were propounded before overwhelming evidence won the day. This narrative is told both in diagrams and through the illustrations that decorate his pages. Engravings of astronomical instruments, telescopes and astrolabes, armillaries and sextants – in use by putti – abound. Portraits of the titans of astronomy – Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler – are set among the stars. The great observatories in Denmark, Paris, London and Berlin appear in corners, fascinating in their details.

Sparrow is good on this aspect of the Atlas, and on how scientists and artists, from early woodcutters struggling to distinguish nebulae against a black sky, to John Hershel in the 1830s, using the new graphite and clay pencils in his astonishing astronomical sketches, rose to the challenge of depicting the heavens. Perhaps the most beautiful chapters in this book relate to the moon. The illustrations, besides the gorgeous plates from the Atlas itself, include delicate watercolours by Galileo, wonderfully detailed engravings made in 1635 by the Frenchman Claude Mellan and two ravishing pastel drawings by Maria Clara Eimmart, the daughter of another 17th-century Nuremberg astronomer.

Doppelmayr was a gatherer-up of science, history, theory and mythology, and so is Sparrow. He discusses the historical importance of astrology and its inextricable link with astronomy, lavishly illustrating the familiar zodiacal figures in their numerous guises. He devotes several pages to catasterism – wonderful new word to me – which is the transformation of heroes, parts of heroes and animals into constellations. And it is in the constellations that surely one of the most startling ideas lurks – that among the cave paintings in Lascaux is a charging bull on whose face and shoulder are marks corresponding to the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in Taurus. But if we are tempted to think that is a long stretch of time, then Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, reminds us in his foreword:

We are the ashes of long-dead stars – or, less romantically, we are ‘nuclear waste’ from the fuel that makes stars shine. Our bodies contain atoms forged from pristine hydrogen in many different stars, throughout the Milky Way, which lived and died more than five billion years ago – before our Sun formed. We are more intimately connected to the stars than astrologers could ever have conceived.