Isaac Habrecht II (1589-1633) was born in Strasbourg the son of the famous maker of that city's astronomical clock. After reading medicine and mathematics and practising as court physician to the counts of Hanau-Lichtenberg, he turned to cartography. In 1621 he published a pair of globes of 8in. diameter (albeit the terrestrial is undated) and of which the celestial globe here offered is an example. Both were engraved by Jakob van Heyden (1573-1645). The cartography of the celestial globe was based on that of Petrus Plancius and Pieter van den Keere on their globe of about 1612, although with the additions of the numerous comets' paths. Plancius and van den Keere are credited with the discovery and introduction of the the new constellations of Camelopardalis, Gallus, Iordanus, Monoceros, Tigros and Apes, all reproduced here, but it is on Habrecht's celestial globe that the constellation Rhombus is first recorded as appearing and it is Habrecht who is generally credited with its discovery. Interestingly, Habrecht was also one of the first cartographers to contemplate constructing a celestial globe with the gores pasted in the inside of a sphere, as would be more realistically accurate. Record of this survives, however, only in the cartouche of his terrestrial globe: Triplicem hunc globum Célestum sci convexum et concavum. This theory of construction would of course become widespread with the practice of pasting celestial gores to the interior of a spherical case for a terrestrial globe. Habrecht also published various planispheres and pamphlets on astronomical phenomena, including the treatise Tractatum de planiglobio coelesti et terrestri in 1628, which was translated into German in 1666. He died of the plague in 1633, shortly after having been appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Strasbourg.
Habrecht's globe gores and planispheres were republished in the 1660's by Paulus Fürst of Nuremburg, and then again around 1690 by Johann Christoph Weigel (1654-1726), another Nuremburg publisher, who by this time owned the copper plates, slightly updated them, and added his own name to the smaller cartouches. It is worth noting that it is these later editions that are described and illustrated in both van der Krogt (Hab2) and Dekker (GLBO118) and in the catalogue of the Schmidt collection, and that the 1621 edition appears to be considerably more scarce than the reissued Weigel version.