Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of portugugese man-of-war and tongued sarsia, medusans living near the ocean's surface in amorphous and tentacled splendor.

Science Art: Portuguese Man-Of-War, Tongued Sarsia, by Philip Henry Gosse

6 April 2025 grant 0

This image comes from Philip Henry Gosse’s A Year at the Shore, specifically, the month of October. (The year isn’t specified, but the book was […]

Scientific illustration of a mudskipper emerging from the water and looking out in air, with diagrams of mudskipper eyeballs and eye positioning.

Science Art: Periophthalmus koelreuteri, 1942.

31 March 2025 grant 0

This is a mudskipper who is being drawn here solely for the qualities of its bulbous, beautiful eyes. The illustration is from page 453 of […]

Scientific illustration of Abraham Lincoln's face compared to a sampling of "Old American" family members.

Science Art: Lincoln’s Measurements, compared with “Old Americans,” 1953 (detail).

24 March 2025 grant 0

This is part of a graphic from a 1953 issue of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s magazine. The article it’s illustrating is […]

Scientific illustration of vast, mighty Olympus Mons stretching for miles and miles across the red-brown surface of Mars, as seen by a stereoscopic camera but rendered in 2D. www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/54371099685/sizes/o/ Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY

Science Art: Mars, Olympus Mons near the terminator, Andrea Luck, 2025

18 March 2025 grant 0

This is the largest volcano in our solar system, as far as anybody knows — the mighty Olympus Mons, as snapped by the ESA Mars […]

Scientific illustration of air traffic control reading a plane's position on an instrument panel, while radar waves bounce in graphic zig-zags off an airplane flying high over a mountain range.

Science Art: Opportunities for Design & Development Engineers…, 1966.

12 March 2025 grant 0

This is the illustration from a full-page ad from the Hughes Aircraft Company in the Jan/Feb 1966 issue of Information Display magazine. This isn’t selling […]

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.

Science Art: The Great Paris Reflector, 1898.

3 March 2025 grant 0

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 […]

Scientific illustration of the mushroom Lepiota echinella, also known as Cystoderma echinellum, small, brown found on the forest floor, seen in cross-section and whole in various stages of growth.

Science Art: Lepiota Echinellus, 1887

24 February 2025 grant 0

You probably shouldn’t eat these. This is an illustration of a Lepiota mushroom from the Bulletin de la Société botanique de France. The genus includes […]

Scientific illustration of a star algae, geometric green with a purple outline, against the black expanse of a peat bog.

Science Art: La Esperanza Del Río, Micrasterias Truncata, Turberas De Peñayerre

17 February 2025 grant 0

This is a star algae, Micrasterias truncata, as photographed very recently and uploaded to the Flickr Commons collection, “Encyclopedia of Life images.” The description for […]

Scientific illustration of science, personified, contemplating beside her microscope.

Science Art: Le miscroscope [La Science], 1908.

10 February 2025 grant 0

This is a metal engraving by Charles Philippe Pillet, which I found in the Paris Museums Collections. It’s considered a “numismatic” piece, but I don’t […]

scientific illustration of crinoid relatives called "cystoidea" - a black background with white stalked and tentacled creatures, something like a cross between opium pods and goose-neck barnacles.

Science Art: Cystoidea, by Ernst Haeckel

3 February 2025 grant 0

This is one of the plates from the 100 illustrations in Kunst-Formen der Natur, or “Art Forms in Nature,” by Ernst Haeckel, a scientist – […]

Scientific illustration of the aftermath of a volcanic eruption, with a man in a suit standing beside a large rock, apparently holding his arms out for scale. Such was science in 1925.

Science Art: Boulder ejected from Halemaumau, at Kīlauea, May 11, 1925

27 January 2025 grant 0

Such was science in 1925. A man in a fedora and tie, pointing at impact craters on the ground, standing next to a large rock, […]

Scientific illustration of a shellfish from the Cambrian era, part of the explosion of new life forms out of single-celled creatures. It's a shellfish, an arthropod, in a midnight sea, being stalked by an Anomolocaris, a terrifying predator.

Science Art: Reconstrucción de Tuzoia canadensis, con Anomalocaris atrás, 2022.

20 January 2025 grant 0

This is an image from one of the ages before dinosaurs. I found it by looking for Anomalocaris, which was a sort of terrifying sea […]

Scientific illustration of the shadows cast by the Earth on the moon.

Science Art: Earth’s Shadow and Penumbra in Sections, 1898.

13 January 2025 grant 0

This delightful diagram appears on a page of A New Astronomy For Beginners that also has an almanac of “Important Future Eclipses” from 1898 (January […]

Scientific illustration of a kingfisher, ready to catch fish in upstate New York of the 1890s.

Science Art: Kingfisher (Ceryle alcyon Boie), 1898

6 January 2025 grant 0

The word “halcyon,” meaning “calm, idyllic, happy times” came from the Greek name for these little guys, who were said to bring, well, halcyon days. […]

Scientific illustration of the "Great Nebula of Andromeda," which we now know as the Andromeda galaxy (with two more galaxies in the frame too).

Science Art: Andromeda Galaxy, by Isaac Roberts, 1888.

30 December 2024 grant 0

It was this photograph’s anniversary today, or so said Robert McNees, posting on Bluesky’s science-communication feed. On the 29th of December, 1888, a Welsh businessman, […]