 There's something incredible, I think, about how when we look at a map we can transport ourselves and our imaginations to the places they show, whether it be a place we visited from our memory or that Paradise Island we would dearly love to travel to. Maps as armchair travel or virtual tourism has actually been a thing for many, many centuries and maps can offer some much needed escapism that's never been true than the present. I'm particularly enthralled by how older maps when we look at them can transport us back in time and of course when we consider maps such as star charts or celestial charts we see the idea and the possibility of traveling beyond our world altogether. I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite items, it's a celestial globe or a star globe. The globe was produced in 1700 in London by a man, a map maker, an instrument maker called Thomas Tussle and it's one of a number of globes from the British Library's collection which we've had digitized and turned into interactive 3D models and put on our website bill.uk forward slash maps for you to study and enjoy for free. We're very grateful to the British Library's digitization service and Cyreel for helping make this possible. The globe is a papier-mache sphere about 36 centimetres in diameter that's set in a mahogany stand and when we look at the surface we can see all sorts of things, we can see all of the known stars, we can see the stars grouped into constellations. Now everyone's familiar with the idea of the terrestrial globe, the globe of the earth but although celestial globes are rather more niche we actually think that they predate terrestrial globes by quite a long way the earliest surviving globe is actually a star globe and actually when you think about it the sky would have had a far greater presence upon people's lives in earlier eras both practically and psychologically. Now a celestial globe doesn't just show the stars, it's actually nothing less than a conceptual model for the entire universe. The idea of it is that the celestial sphere was imagined to be this colossal globe that actually encased our own world with the earth right in the center and on to the inside of this vast globe was studded all of the stars and celestial objects you can imagine. That's basically the idea behind it and we the viewer looking at the globes are placed outside the globe looking in which is why when you look at celestial globes actually all of the constellations and the stars are the wrong way around, they're back to front and that's why we're pretty sure that one of the main users of celestial globes was not stargazing. We think they're very we think they're very probably used for teaching or education, theorizing about the world, the nature and form of the universe and also that often forgotten aspect of maths, it's incredibly important cultural enrichment and enjoyment.