Science Art: The midnight sun, from Atlas zu Alex. V. Humboldt’s Kosmos, 1851.

^{Click to embiggen}

Polar bears salute the midnight sun as Arctic explorers sail to the horizon.

This image is part of a page of “Cosmic Meteorological Landscapes” that are all pretty fantastic.

Traugott Bromme made this atlas with (or as a supplement to) Alexander von Humboldt. Both were great wanderers – Bromme was from Leipzig, but in the mid-19th century wrote one of the first guidebooks to the United States, Canada, and Central America for Europeans (a favorite text for German immigrants), sailed as a surgeon on a Colombian ship, and spent time in a Haitian prison. Humboldt, of course, went everywhere, had a squid named after him, and wrote a book, Kosmos, intended to unify all fields of science.

So this is an atlas Bromme compiled for Humboldt’s big book. Wikipedia says it was “a pirated version” of Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas for Humboldt’s Kosmos, but I don’t really know what that means. The full text is over yonder if you want to see for yourself.

[via Nemfrog]