Digital Reconstruction of Perczel’s Globe

The 132 cm diameter manuscript globe of Perczel from 1862 is among the largest ones of Central Europe. This sphere suffered severe damage during the storms of the history of the 20th century. A restoration was carried out in the 1970’s but due to the improper solutions it caused further information loss. The steps of the reconstruction project are the following: creating a digital facsimile of this globe in order to archive its present state; finding the possible source materials that were used for compiling the globe; reconstructing the globe in digital form based on the digital facsimile globe, the original source materials and contemporary descriptions of the globe; creating a renewed copy of the globe. The original and the reconstructed digital globe will also be placed in the Virtual Globes Museum (http://vgm.elte.hu). This paper describes the methods of this project and the first results of the work.