The reds on f671

Page f67r2, the so-called `seven planets' page, is remarkable for its use of red ink in the text.

The diagram on that page shows 12 round moons in a circle, each with a face and a crescent-shaped shadow. The shadow is painted red in seven of the moons, and light yellow in the other five.

It would be highly desirable to know whether the red shadows and the red text are done with the same ink. The red text is almost surely original: it lies between two lines of sepia text, and its handwriting looks quite sure and neat. If the moon shadows are done with the same ink, they must be original too. That would help resolve the question of whether the colors in other illustrations are original, or later additions.

For whatever it is worth, here are a few pixels of red ink clipped from the JPEG images of f67r available at the Beinecke library site:

From left to right, they are taken from the moon at 06:00, the blotted "k" in the bottom text, and one of the red spokes in the neighboring page f67r1. The scale is the same.

These samples were converted from JPEG to a 24-bit format, magnified, then converted back to JPEG. Beware that any differences you may see may be due to JPEG artifacts, variation in ink thickness, exposure to sunlight, etc.