Shining new light on 500-year-old map
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.028254
Wired : The 1491 Martellus map, now housed at Yale University, may have been used by Christopher Columbus when he planned his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Although the 1.2-by-2.0-meter map has survived for five centuries, its paint and text have faded. Now researchers are using advanced multispectral imaging to reveal text in places where it is not visible to the naked eye. Because of uneven erosion and fading pigments, however, each section of the map requires a different wavelength of light. Using 12 different types of LED illumination ranging from UV to IR, the team has photographed the map in 55 overlapping tiles. Through extensive image processing and analysis, they hope to extract all the readable text by next year and make the images available on Yale’s Beinecke Digital Library website.
