print of lecture on astronomy with orrery and telescope

This page is from Asa Smith's "Illustrated Astronomy" textbook. This is a print of two teachers explaining the solar system to a group of eleven young, male students. The teacher on the left instructs a student to observe planets through a telescope, while pointing them out with a stick as three other students look on.

A seated student at the center turns the crank of a portable orrery (grown from a table top model to enormous scale). It is decorated with zodiacal constellations labeled with their associated months. A second teacher lectures on the operations of the orrery to six students.

There is possibly a deliberate contrast between the "real" planets in the sky, which have ironically been mapped in a series of concentric circles in a diagrammatic format, and the representation of planets revolving around the sun in the orrery below, a microcosmic model of the macrocosmic universe.