For centuries Europeans drew comets, meteors and meteorites in ways that reflected how they understood the sky. The Bayeux Tapestry, from the eleventh century, shows people staring at Halley's Comet. Later German and French manuscripts depicted comets as warnings of disaster, with painters drawing them as fearsome signs above towns. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, astronomers began to treat comets as objects that moved through the heavens, and treatises gathered observations and sketches. By the nineteenth century, illustrators were showing comets alongside careful records of orbits, meteor showers and meteorite falls such as the 1866 event at Knyahinya in Ukraine. The images trace a shift from prophecy to observation. Comets were the same objects all along; what changed was the way people looked at them.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.