Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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, […]

Scientific illustration of a root seen through a microscope, all purple and magenta in round geometries. In the 1970s, this looked like the future.

Science Art: Cross Section of a Young Root, by Roman Vishniac, c. 1978.

22 December 2024 grant 0

This is an image from “the birth of photomicrography.” It’s also an image from the fondly remembered Omni magazine, an issue from 1978 which I […]

Scientific illustration of angles, forming squares, rectangles, and other polygons. Mathematics in colorful patterns.

Science Art: 10,000 convex and nonconvex regular polygons, by Arthur Baelde.

18 December 2024 grant 0

This is from the “Posters about Mathematics” section of Wikimedia Commons. The description says: “For a young child, a shape can be called a square […]

Scientific illustration of a tortoise and blue-footed booby, done in a mid-century cartoon style, as part of an ad for Lindblad Travel in 1969.

Science Art: Lindblad Travel ad, 1969.

9 December 2024 grant 0

Today, the company that produced this add is known as Lindblad Expeditions, and is so closely associated with National Geographic that it’s often known as […]

Scientific illustration in the form of an amplified photograph. The frame is filled mostly - but not entirely - with the red surface of Mars, a corner of deep space visible to the top left. In the center, barely visible, is a gleaming steel circle, a tiny droplet of metal descending to the rust-colored surface.

Science Art: Mars – Jezero Crater – NASA’s Perseverance Landing, Feb 18,2021

1 December 2024 grant 0

This is a piece of art, or scientific illustration, I found on the Flickr account of Andrea Luck, though the full credit is NASA/JPL-Caltech/Simeon Schmauß/AndreaLuck. […]

Scientific Illustration of a brittle star, a black and white photo with a geometric symmetry or symmetrical geometry - at any rate, the top and bottom views look like mirror images next to each other.

Science Art: Ophiactis tricolor: a, arboral view; b, oral view of holotype.

25 November 2024 grant 0

These are brittle stars, photographed in the 1920s for the Records of the South Australia Museum. These specific ones are from “Dr. Verco’s collection in […]