Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of a space capsule landing on water, photographed by NASA/Keegan Barber.

Science Art: Crew-5’s Nighttime Splashdown, by NASA/Keegan Barber, 2023

26 March 2023 grant 0

SpaceX Dragon Endurance returns to Earth on the night of March 11, 2023. Specifically, it’s just after 9:00 p.m. in the waters off Tampa, Florida. […]

Scientific illustration of a fossii flower, the flower of a cycad.

Science Art: A Fossil Flower (Cycadeoidea ingens), 1924.

19 March 2023 grant 0

This is a photograph of a model from the Field Museum of Natural History, representing a cycad flower reconstructed from a fossil. The fossil came […]

Scientific illustration of the International Space Station, orbiting high above the Caspian Sea, as photographed by Space Shuttle Discovery.

Science Art: ISS Aug 2005, by NASA.

12 March 2023 grant 0

The Space Shuttle Discovery shot this photo of the International Space Station flying high over the Caspian Sea during the STS-114 Return to Flight mission. […]

Scientific illustration of Victorian machinery, a mechanical device used to screw into metal.

Science Art: Britannia Co.’s Patent Screwing Machine, 1890.

5 March 2023 grant 0

“Screws at one single cut,” the ad boasts. This is an ad from the front of The Engineer’s Sketch-Book of Mechanical Movements, by Thomas W. […]

Scientific illustration of a spiny lobster nymph dyed blue-green for the microscope., all legs and bubble-body and eyes (or tails?) on long stalks.

Science Art: Evibacus princeps, 2019

26 February 2023 grant 0

It’s a wickle baby slipper lobster! That color came from it being prepared on a slide so it could be examined under a microscope. The […]

Scientific illustration of a pterosaur, a flying dinosaur-like animal called Mimodactylus. It has broad, white, black-rimmed wings and is soaring above a sandy islet in a bright blue lagoon of prehistoric Afro-Arabia.

Science Art: Mimodactylus in life, 2019.

19 February 2023 grant 0

This is a painting of Mimodactylus libanensis soaring over what Nature (where it was first published) called “Afro-Arabia,” a continent that existed many millions of […]

Scientific illustration in the form of a black-and-white photo of a device used to test how an engine uses up lubrication oil, consisting of a long shaft ending in a gear, lined with rows of tubes and nozzles, with a row of small bottles along the front.

Science Art: Test Apparatus, 1960

12 February 2023 grant 0

A test apparatus, as used for the article “Modification of Force Feed Lubricators” in the 1960-05 edition of Lubrication Engineering. The idea was to study […]

Scientific illustration of a Mars Science Laboratory - that is, a steel capsule not unlike a 1950s concept of a flying saucer - starting to meet resistance in the thin Martian air, with visible plumes of white atmosphere spraying from its underside.

Science Art: Deceleration of Mars Science Laboratory in Martian Atmosphere, 2011

5 February 2023 grant 0

An image from NASA/JPL-Caltech depicting a capsule starting to slow down in the Martian atmosphere. All we see is the outer structure, which seems mostly […]

A scientific illustration of a DNA molecule, twisting away in front of a wet-looking background.

Science Art: DNA Double Helix, by the National Human Genome Research Institute

29 January 2023 grant 0

An image of the machine that builds our bodies, bit by bit. From the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, located at […]

Scientific illustration of a rabbit, bright-eyed and determined, outrunning an owl, claws outstretched and hungry beak open wide.

Science Art: Just Missed Him, by G.E. Lodge, 1898.

22 January 2023 grant 0

I wasn’t sure if this really counted as a scientific illustration, despite finding it in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, since most of the other plates […]

Scientific illustration of colorful sea anemones practically glowing in orange, yellow, and red against the blackness of an undersea cave or rock face.

Science Art: Corynactis Viritis (et al), Phillip Henry Gosse, 1860.

15 January 2023 grant 0

These are sea anemones, from History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals by Phillip Henry Gosse. They are, according to the caption below: 1-5 Corynactis […]

Scientific illustration of... well, there's a lot going on here. We've got a mythical-looking figure in a loincloth, sort of half-Zeus (his right hand is holding lightning bolts) and half-Hephaestus (his left hand, to our right, is on a large switch) Along the lower right of the image there are insets of various early 20th-century electrical devices. To the left and across the bottom is a block of text advertising a course in electrical science in the form of a book by S. Gernsback (doubtless a relative of the publisher, Hugo Gernsback) and H.W. Secor. It only costs a dollar!

Science Art: Experimental Electricity Course, 1916.

8 January 2023 grant 0

This is how you advertise a science book. At least, it was how Hugo Gernsback did in the pages of The Electrical Experimenter in September […]

Science Art: Papillons, from Larousse Universe, 1922

1 January 2023 grant 0

Thanks to an unexpected gift from an old friend, I was just reading an article in the print edition of Scientific American about the Sora […]

Scientific illustration of an ad touting nuclear power, in a 1950s/1960s style, showing a cheerful Santa over a young boy reaching for a colorful atomic model under the words "Science by Santa: Remember bad kids get coal, Good kids get Uranium which produces 3 million times more power and 10 million times less waste for their christmas lights." (With the odd capitalization in the original text.)

Science Art: Science by Santa: Remember bad kids get coal, Good kids get Uranium….,

25 December 2022 grant 0

Uranium, which produces 3 million times more energy and 10 million times less waste! I honestly have no idea if this PSA is real or […]

Scientific illustration: a B&W image of the interior of a spacecraft and an astronaut, with a small, orange item floating in midair off to the middle right - a tiny Snoopy doll used to measure relative weightlessness inside the cabin.

Science Art: Snoopy Hitches Ride to Space Aboard Artemis I, November 2022

18 December 2022 grant 0

This is a NASA-released image of a very important piece of space technology. That small, color-corrected orange thing is a tiny plush Snoopy doll used […]