VINTAGE TELESCOPE DRAWING MANUAL

(Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) Star clusters in Hercules, from a study made in June of 1877.

VINTAGE TELESCOPE DRAWING MANUAL

In 1882, Charles Scribner’s Sons published Trouvelot’s scientific writings about the phenomena he observed as The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual ( public library | public domain). (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) Part of the Milky Way, from a study made between 18. The best of Trouvelot’s pastels were exhibited alongside Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Heinz Ketchup, the first commercially successful typewriter, and the torch-clutching right arm of the Statue of Liberty at the first World’s Fair in Philadelphia - the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) Total eclipse of the sun, observed July 29, 1878, at Creston, Wyoming Territory.

The planet Mars, observed September 3, 1877, 11:55 P.M. Étienne Léopold Trouvelotĭetermined to make astronomy more accessible and captivating to the public, he set about depicting “the celestial phenomena as they appear to a trained eye and to an experienced draughtsman.” Using the era’s “great modern telescopes, provided with the most delicate instrumental appliances,” he made astronomical observations and translated them into stunning art, most remarkable of which were his painstaking pastel drawings created over the course of two years in the early 1870s - a period when Eadweard Muybridge was pioneering another revolutionary union of art and science on the other side of the country. Emma Converse - the remarkable forgotten woman who popularized astronomy a century before Carl Sagan - called Trouvelot “the prince of observers.” The aesthetic splendor and scientific rigor of his illustrations so impressed the director of the Harvard Observatory that Trouvelot was invited to join the observatory staff, which he did in 1872. He created more than seven thousand, among them some of the most beguiling contributions to our long history of visualizing the cosmos. Trouvelot published more than fifty scientific papers in his lifetime, but remains best known for his exquisite astronomical illustrations. Hardly anyone has championed the role of beauty as a catalyst for cosmic enchantment more powerfully than the French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (December 26, 1827–April 22, 1895). “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin observed in reflecting on our ongoing quest to know the universe.

Vintage telescope drawing