This issue of JAHH includes a wide range of papers, but the one that the ‘Editorial Team’ chose to feature on the front cover was “Astronomy in Mexico During the Colonial Period” by Marco Arturo Moreno Corral, William J. Schuster, and Maria Guadalupe López Molina (see pp. 137–162).

This paper reviews the use and development of Western astronomy in ‘New Spain’ (today’s Mexico) during three centuries of Spanish domination. It shows how the Novo Hispanics initially adopted the Earth-centred Ptolemaic view of the Universe, and only very slowly changed to the Copernican heliocentric model.

The images on the front cover are a 1606 map showing the Viceroyalty of New Spain (top), and below it a very ‘busy’ diagram about the Great Comet of 1680–1681 published by Francisco Rodríguez Lupercio in 1681, and the temporary observatory Zúñiga y Ontiveros set up in Mexico City so that he could observe the 1769 transit of Venus.

This issue of JAHH includes a wide range of papers, but the one that the ‘Editorial Team’ chose to feature on the front cover was “Astronomy in Mexico During the Colonial Period” by Marco Arturo Moreno Corral, William J. Schuster, and Maria Guadalupe López Molina (see pp. 137–162).

This paper reviews the use and development of Western astronomiy in ‘New Spain’ (today’s Mexico) during three centuries of Spanish domination. It shows how the Novo Hispanics initially adopted the Earth-centred Ptolemaic view of the Universe, and only very slowly changed to the Copernican heliocentric model.

The images on the front cover are a 1606 map showing the Viceroyalty of New Spain (top), and below it a very ‘busy’ diagram about the Great Comet of 1680–1681 published by Francisco Rodríguez Lupercio in 1681, and the temporary observatory Zúñiga y Ontiveros set up in Mexico City so that he could observe the 1769 transit of Venus.