Scheepvaart museum Amsterdam

made from brass by Zacharias Bucha (Aachen, 1633). An armillary sphere is an open celestial globe with a smal sphere in the centre to represent the Earth, The rings stand for the various circles of the heaven: the celestial equator, the ecliptic ring (with the signs of the zodiac, and a number of meridians. Objects such as this also symbolize the universe as a whole.