This may not be a museum that will interest the general public but a visit to the Globe Museum in the Palais Mollard-Clary in Innere Stadt can give one a different perspective about the planet that we live in. The only one of its kind in the world, the Globen Museum houses a collection of about 600 terrestrial, celestial and lunar globes. It was opened to the public in 1956 and is part of the Austrian National Library. Cartographers and those who possess an interest for this special field will appreciate the amount of craftsmanship and detail that can be found in the making of the globes themselves. There are a good number of antique globes that date back to the 19th century, started from the collection of the Habsburgs and the rest were acquired as purchases or donations to the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes.
The globes show different perspectives of the earth along with other celestial bodies and how the science of cartography and cosmography has also evolved with the advances in technology and how man travels around the world. Some notable displays include a terrestrial globe from the 16th century and was created by mathematician and cartographer Gemma Frisius. There is also a display of brass tellurions, an old method of demonstrating how the earth rotates on its axes and the effects of the sun and the moon on it. Aside from the globes, the museum also has an extensive section on maps which consist of about 275,000 maps and over 70,000 volumes of literature on the field.
