Two Pages from the Book of Fixed Stars, 1690 Manuscript

Qatar National Library provides a high-resolution digital master copy of a 1690 manuscript from its Heritage Collection. The manuscript, authored by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, contains two pages from the 'Book of Fixed Stars'. The 172.3 MB ZIP file is available under a CC0 1.0 license.

Use Cases

• Train optical character recognition (OCR) models on historical Arabic script based on the manuscript images.
• Analyze historical astronomical illustrations and iconography based on the 'Book of Fixed Stars' content.
• Develop image segmentation models to separate text from decorative elements in high-resolution manuscript scans.
• Study the evolution of scientific knowledge and manuscript production in the Islamic world based on the described source.

Strengths

• High-resolution digital master copy, suggesting detailed visual fidelity.
• Clear provenance from the Qatar National Library Heritage Collection (manuscript HC.MS.2018.0048).
• File size of 172.3 MB indicates a medium-scale, potentially detailed image resource.

Limitations

• The dataset description is limited; actual data content and quality require manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The specific scope beyond the two pages is unclear from the available metadata.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection.

Collection Method

Digitization of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

Manuscript dated 1690.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-02 09:50:50; freshness should be verified.