The screen-printed typographic layout of the cover pays homage to the first edition of Histoire du ciel [History of the sky] written by French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1883).
The cover also reproduces a sketch of M13, a globular cluster of several hundred thousand stars, which was sent to Lord Rosse. An amateur astronomer, he built a giant telescope on his Irish estate and discovered the galaxy M51 in 1845. Some think that his drawings of spiral galaxies inspired Van Gogh for his Starry Night.
“Van Gogh painted Starry Night Over the Rhône in September 1888, just as fascination with astronomy was spreading throughout Europe. This painting, in which the skies of Provence are depicted with great precision, is the result of the close attention Van Gogh paid to the emotions he felt at night, and to the work of artists who had portrayed evenings before him. In this seminal painting, Van Gogh achieves a degree of expression that is unique in art, and a celestial accuracy that echoes his contemporaries’ interest in the stars.”