Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of a video camera tube, a cylindrical electronic component, drawn in shades of gray over a background of Chinese writing, mathematical formulae, and typed computer readouts.

Science Art: If Resolution and Recognizability are Important to You…, 1966

31 August 2025 grant 0

A General Electrodynamics Corporation ad for a television camera vidicon, a video camera tube – a thing that works like an old-fashioned television screen, scanning […]

Scientific illustration of an electronic brain, a glowing network of light spilling up from a city and into a colossal floating brain overhead, blue and purple lights against a black sky.

Science Art: How ChatGPT visualizes itself.webp, by ChatGPT

25 August 2025 grant 0

Yes, this is AI art. But it is AI art that is by AI and about AI. From the image description on Wikimedia Commons: ChatGPT […]

Scientific illustration of many fish, arrayed in splendor: sharks, rays, skates, lungfish, anglerfish, sea horses, porcupine fish, so many fish.

Science Art: Poissons (B), by Adolphe Millot .

18 August 2025 grant 0

The fish, the fishes of the world, including at least one extinct fish (#21, Ceratodus, the coelacanth-looking one down there on the bottom left). There […]

Scientific illustration of three goldfish, iridescent in gold, orange, and silver, with the partially adorable and partially monstrous faces of overweight pugs: pursed lips, full cheeks, and bulging eyes.

Science Art: Long-Tsing-Yu or Les Yeux des Dragon

11 August 2025 grant 0

These are some of the first goldfish ever seen in Europe. The image (which I found in a great Public Domain Review article) came from […]

Scientific illustration of a rocket launching in the 1950s, metal scaffolding and exhaust clouds, a white tower rising skyward, gleaming in black and white.

Science Art: First missile launched at Cape Canaveral, July 24, 1950.

4 August 2025 grant 0

A photo from the San Diego Air and Space Museum’s collection of Images from NASA/Cape Canaveral. Here are a couple of quotes from a recent […]

Scientific illustration diagramming a particular kind of game theory based on decision-making ... resuling in a graph that looks like a series of gothic arches.

Science Art: A four stage sequential game with a foresight bound, Marco Mantovani

28 July 2025 grant 0

This is a game theory diagram from the paper, “Limited backward induction: foresight and behavior in sequential games,” though I found it on Wikimedia Commons. […]

Scientific illustration of the Aethereal Sylph hummingbird, brilliant reds and greens and long, ornamental tails - now known as the violet-tailed sylph.

Science Art: A New Hummingbird From Ecuador, 1926

20 July 2025 grant 0

From the pages of the November-December 1926 issue of Natural History magazine (found on archive.org) flies “The Aethereal Sylph (Cyanolesbia coelestis aetherius Chapman)”. The blue… […]

Scientific illustration of a medieval submarine, the "Rotterdam Ship," designed to ram battleships underwater in the Age of Sail.

Science Art: The “Rotterdam Ship” was one of the earliest submarines…, 1934

14 July 2025 grant 0

This image is actually much older than 1934; it’s just that that is when William Beebe published it (courtesy of the New York Public Library) […]

Scientific illustration of a whale louse, or whale lice, in a symmetrical collage of spiny legs and many details of heads, growth stages, body parts.

Science Art: Cyamus boopis, Lütken, 1895.

7 July 2025 grant 0

Cyamis boopis is one of the cyamidae better known as a whale louse. This particular species is from Scandinavia, as illustrated in the book An […]

Scientific illustration of an Anglo-Saxon burial, a ship burial from before the age of the Vikings, shadowy figures of warriors, kinsmen, or household servants lining up alongside a wooden ship, preparing to cover it with earth.The lotd's body is inside it.

Science Art: Figures preparing the Sutton Hoo ship for burial, Craig Williams

29 June 2025 grant 0

This is an illustration from the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo Collection, studying the grave (and buried treasures) of a “Very Important Person” laid to rest […]

Scientific illustration of Surveyor-1, a nearly abstract collection of angles, legs, boxes, and support struts done in monochrome black and white, a photograph rendered as a ghostly stencil of a spacecraft.

Science Art: Detail from Tinsley Laboratories ad, 1966.

23 June 2025 grant 0

That’s a closeup of the Surveyor-1 satellite printed above an image of the Gemini orbital capsule, with the words “WE GAVE” (image of Surveyor-1) “a […]

Scientific illustration of Venus transiting in front of the Sun, as captured by the Solar Dynamics Observetory satellite, a flaming metallic orb girdled by a series of perfectly circular silhouettes making a diagonal line from the upper left to the middle right of the image.

Science Art: Transit of Venus in 2012.

9 June 2025 grant 0

This is Venus, moving in front of the Sun. Technically, I suppose it’s a lot of Venuses, or a chain of a lot of pictures […]

Scientific illustration of a white plume moth, long legs, very white against a black background.

Science Art: Pterophorus pentadactyla MHNT, by Didier Descouens

2 June 2025 grant 0

This is an image of a white plume moth, a photograph taken of a specimen in the Muséum de Toulouse in August of 2011. The […]

Scientific illustration of machines for moving water. Ducts, pumps, pistons, turbines.

Science Art: Turbines and Pumps, Manchester, 1882.

26 May 2025 grant 0

This is a waterwork as the Industrial Revolution hit full swing. It’s the final image in a book I’ve used here before, A practical treatise […]

Scientific illustration of a sawfly feeding on a plum, purplish-black insect glittering darkly over a white larva on a hard, green fruit.

Science Art: Hoplocampa minuta, Plommonstekel Ugglan, 1920.

19 May 2025 grant 0

“A kind of sawfly living on plum trees,” according to the Wikimedia Commons gallery of images from Nordisk familjebok. They’re considered a pest — the […]