able to cling by their legs and tails to the beams of their cage as it swirls through space". The chameleon on the left sticks out his tongue, perhaps in commentary; H. S. M. Coxeter observes that the tongue has an unusual spiral-shaped tip. Influences Escher's interest in geometry is well known, but he was also an avid amateur astronomer, and in the early 1940s he became a member of the Dutch Association for Meteorology and Astronomy. He owned a 6 cm refracting telescope, and recorded several observations of binary stars. The use of polyhedra to model heavenly bodies can be traced back to Plato, who in the Timaeus identified the regular dodecahedron with the shape of the heavens and its 12 faces with the constellations of the zodiac. Later, Johannes Kepler theorized that the distribution of distances of the planets from the sun could be explained by the shapes of the five Platonic solids, nested within each other. Escher kept a model of this system of nested polyhedra, and regularly depicted polyhedra in his artworks relating to astronomy and other worlds. Escher learned his wood engraving technique from Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. He illustrated the octahedral compound of Stars in the beveled wire-frame style that had been used by Leonardo da Vinci in his illustrations for Luca Pacioli's 1509 book, De divina proportione. The stella octangula (Latin for "eight-pointed star") in the upper right of Stars was first described by Pacioli, and later rediscovered by Kepler, who gave it its astronomical name. H. S. M. Coxeter reports that the shape of the central chameleon cage in Stars had previously been described in 1900 by Max Brückner, whose book Vielecke und Vielflache includes a photograph of a model of the same shape. Coxeter, believing that Escher was not aware of this reference, wrote "It is remarkable that Escher, without any knowledge of algebra or analytic geometry, was able to rediscover this highly symmetrical figure." However, George W. Hart has documented that Escher was familiar with Brückner's book and based much of his knowledge of stellated polyhedra and polyhedral compounds on it. Analysis Martin Beech interprets the many polyhedral compounds within Stars as corresponding to double stars and triple star systems in astronomy. Beech writes that, for Escher, the mathematical orderliness of polyhedra depicts the "stability and timeless quality" of the heavens, and similarly Marianne L. Teuber writes that Stars "celebrates