Science Art

The Death’s Head Hawkmoth. There’s a more recent photograph of one here; the first time I remember learning this beauty’s name was in a brilliantly […]

Sixteen Black Dot Tentacles by Ernst Haeckel. This may look like an abstract or a mathematical exercise; it’s not. It’s an illustration of a microscopic […]

Astronomical charts from Gujin Tushu Jicheng, a Qing dynasty Chinese encyclopedia.

Click to embiggen A dicey bit of racial taxonomy from The New Students Reference Work (1914), edited by Chandler B. Beach, associate editor Frank Morton […]

Diagram from Wikimedia Commons. It’s like op art.

Click to embiggen Photo by NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). You can read more about V838 Monocerotis exploding and swallowing nearby planets […]

Click to embiggen This is an image from an old Norwegian encyclopedia, the “Norwegian Familybook” published sometime from 1904 to 1926. In Norwegian, the animals […]

A microscopic image of liquid crystal by Wikimedia Commons user "Minutemen." Happy Easter.

Click for larger image This is a visible-light image of M-104, the Sombrero Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If our eyes were sharp […]

The Guardian is featuring an incredible slideshow of the Wellcome Image Awards 2008. Go, look, be awed.

A leaf, with something on it, as seen at nearly 2,000 times normal size through a scanning electron microscope (SEM). There are more SEM images […]

A deep-water crustacean, captured on film by Flemish marine biologist Lycaon.

A 15th century AD Egyptian diagram kept by the University Library in Istanbul, showing what’s inside a horse.

A scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of shells about twice the size of grains of salt, embedded in sand. You can find more at the […]