The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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A beetle of character. From Wikimedia Commons.

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From the Linda Hall Library “Scientist of the Day” entry on Henry Fairfield Osborn:

Osborn named and described some of the most famous dinosaurs in the world, including Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Ornitholestes, Struthiominus, and Oviraptor. Oddly, Osborn did not discover any of these dinosaurs. In the “old days” (the 1820s), dinosaurs such as Iguanodon and Megalosaurus were named and described by their finders, but by the late 19th century, paleontology had become a …

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From the Smithsonian Institutes’ National Air and Space Museum “Eyewitness to Space” collection, paintings from the years when NASA had fine artists capture the technology taking humans into space:

Working together, James Dean, a young artist employed by the NASA Public Affairs office, and Dr. H. Lester Cooke, curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, created a program that dispatched artists to NASA facilities with an invitation to paint whatever interested…

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If it looks like a miniature sun, maybe that’s because on one level it is – it’s creating plasma, which surrounds it like a corona around the sun. This plasma is being generated by an electrical current, of course, and not a vast fusion reaction in space.

You can read more about what’s going on in this page on how ionization tubes work in an electric circuit. They’re related to neon lights – fill what would be a vacuum tube up with a particular gas, and an electric …

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Galileo drew pictures of the moon – pictures that included imperfections on the surface. The moon, he observed, had texture. Hills and valleys. Craters. Dimensionality.

This was controversial at the time; if heavenly bodies couldn’t lead us to greater perfection, what could?

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These are the optical effects you have to be aware of if you’re going to describe the sky when ice-filled cirrus clouds are overhead. Ice crystals refract sunlight differently than water droplets, and you get these curves and halos which a trained meteorologist (of the 1930s) had to be able to record accurately.

It’s from a U.S. Weather Bureau manual for meteorologists that I found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.