The provenance of the astrolabe collection at the national maritime museum

Abstract The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich belongs to a select group of institutions that house large collections of planispheric astrolabes. Only the collection at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford is larger, while the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the Istituto e Museo diStoria della Scienza in Florence, and the British Museum in London have comparable numbers of astrolabes in their collections. In terms of quality, however, the collection at the National Maritime Museum presents perhaps the finest balance between astrolabes of the Western and Eastern tradition.