Science Art: The Great Paris Reflector, 1898.

3 March 2025 grant Featured, Science Art 0

Scientific illustration of a giant telescope from the 1800s, showing a few well-dressed science fans walking on to the tower that is the telescope.
Scientific illustration of a giant telescope from the 1800s, showing a few well-dressed science fans walking on to the tower that is the telescope.

This is an image from The New Astronomy, a textbook of space sciences I found on archive.org.

It’s one of what was at the time the largest telescopes ever built, a reflector that used a big, curved mirror to magnify. As the book says:

At the Paris Observatory is a great silver-on-glass reflector of nearly four feet aperture ; and an instrument ten feet in diameter has been projected for the Paris Exposition of 1900. It is interesting to note that none of these great instruments have been constructed in America.