Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time in 4,000 Years of Mapping the Universe

Paintings of Saturn by German astronomer-artist Maria Clara Eimmart, a pioneering woman in science, from 1693–1698.

Eimmart's depictions are based on a 1659 engraving by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, the first to confirm that Saturn’s mysterious appendages, which had confounded astronomers since Galileo Galilei, were in fact 'a thin flat ring, nowhere touching.'

What makes Eimmart's painting unique is that it combines the observations of more than ten astronomers into a depiction of superior accuracy.

Credit: Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Bologna

Long before Galileo pioneered the telescope, antagonising the church and unleashing a “hummingbird effect” of innovation, humanity had been busy cataloguing the heavens through millennia of imaginative speculative maps of the cosmos.

We have always sought to make visible the invisible forces we long to understand, the mercy and miracle of existence, and nothing beckons to us with more intense allure than the majesty and mystery of the universe.

Four millennia of that mesmerism-made-visible is what journalist, photographer, and astro-visualisation scholar Michael Benson explores with great dedication and discernment in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, a pictorial catalogue of our quest to order the cosmos and grasp our place in it, a sensemaking process defined by what Benson aptly calls our “gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness.”

From glorious paintings of the creation myth predating William Blake’s work by centuries to the pioneering galaxy drawing that inspired Van Gogh’s Starry Night to NASA’s maps of the Apollo 11 landing site, the images remind us that the cosmos, like Whitman, like ourselves, is vast and contains multitudes.

This masterwork of scholarship also attests, ever so gently, ever so powerfully, to the value of the “ungoogleable,” a considerable portion of Benson’s bewitching images comes from the vaults of the world’s great science libraries and archives, bringing to light a wealth of previously unseen treasures.

Beginning in 1870, French-born artist and astronomer Étienne Trouvelot spent a decade producing a series of spectacular illustrations of celestial bodies and cosmic phenomena. 

In 1872, he joined the Harvard College Observatory and began using its powerful telescopes in perfecting his drawings. 

His pastel illustrations, including this chromolithograph of Mare Humorum, a vast impact basin on the southwest side of the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon, were among the first serious attempts to enlist art in making popular the results of observations using technology developed for scientific research.

Courtesy of the U. of Michigan Library

Étienne Trouvelot's 1873 engravings of solar phenomena, produced during his first year at the Harvard College Observatory for the institution's journal. 

The legend at the bottom reveals that the distance between the two prominences in the lower part of the engraving is one hundred thousand miles, more than 12 times the diameter of Earth. 

Despite the journal's modest circulation, such engravings were soon co-opted by more mainstream publications and became trailblazing tools of science communication that greatly influenced public understanding of the universe's scale.

Courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard

The Oldest Living Things on our Earth - Video

In this beautiful short trailer of 'The Oldest Living Things in the World' by filmmaker Jonathan Minnard offers glimpse of Rachel Sussman’s extraordinary world.



Interwoven with Sussman’s photographs and essays, brimming with equal parts passion and precision, are the stories of her adventures, and misadventures, as she trekked the world in search of her ancient subjects.

From a broken arm in remote Malaysia to a heart-wrenching breakup to a well-timed sip of whisky at polar explorer Shackleton’s grave (Grytviken), her personal stories imbue the universality of the deeper issues she explores with an inviting dose of humanity — a gentle reminder that life, for us as much as for those ancient organisms, is often about withstanding the uncontrollable, unpredictable, and unwelcome difficulties the universe throws our way, and that resilience comes from the dignity and humility of that withstanding.

“Our overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not,” philosopher Stephen Cave observed in his poignant meditation on our mortality paradox

And yet we continue to long for the secrets of the secrets of that ever-elusive eternity.

Bristlecone Pine: White Mountains, California

With an artist’s gift for “aesthetic force” and a scientist’s rigorous respect for truth, Sussman straddles a multitude of worlds as she travels across space and time to unearth Earth’s greatest stories of resilience, stories of tragedy and triumph, past and future, but above all stories that humble our human lives, which seem like the blink of a cosmic eye against the timescales of these ancient organisms — organisms that have unflinchingly witnessed all of our own tragedies and triumphs, our wars and our revolutions, our holocausts and our renaissances, and have remained anchored to existence more firmly than we can ever hope to be.

Brain Coral: Speyside, Tobago

And yet a great many of these species are on the verge of extinction, in no small part due to human activity, raising the question of how our seemingly ephemeral presence in the ecosystem can have such deep and long-term impact on organisms far older and far more naturally resilient than us.

Fortingall Yew: Perthshire, Scotland

Sun's energy influences 1,000 years of natural climate variability

This is a composite created from three images received from MODIS instruments carried on NASA's Terra and Aqua polar orbiting satellites. 

The images were received at the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station at 1151, 1205 and 1342 UTC on 7th Jan. 2010. 

Credit: NASA

Changes in the sun's energy output may have led to marked natural climate change in Europe over the last 1000 years, according to researchers at Cardiff University.

Scientists studied seafloor sediments to determine how the temperature of the North Atlantic and its localised atmospheric circulation had altered.

Warm surface waters flowing across the North Atlantic, an extension of the Gulf Stream, and warm westerly winds are responsible for the relatively mild climate of Europe, especially in winter.

Slight changes in the transport of heat associated with these systems can led to regional climate variability, and the study findings matched historic accounts of climate change, including the notoriously severe winters of the 16th and 18th centuries which pre-date global industrialisation.

The study found that changes in the Sun's activity can have a considerable impact on the ocean-atmospheric dynamics in the North Atlantic, with potential effects on regional climate.

Predictions suggest a prolonged period of low sun activity over the next few decades, but any associated natural temperature changes will be much smaller than those created by human carbon dioxide emissions, say researchers.

The study, led by Cardiff University scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Bern, is published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Paola Moffa-Sanchez

Dr Paola Moffa-Sanchez, lead author from Cardiff University School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, explained: "We used seafloor sediments taken from south of Iceland to study changes in the warm surface ocean current."

"This was done by analysing the chemical composition of fossilised microorganisms that had once lived in the surface of the ocean."

"These measurements were then used to reconstruct the seawater temperature and the salinity of this key ocean current over the past 1000 years."

The results of these analyses revealed large and abrupt temperature and salinity changes in the north-flowing warm current on time-scales of several decades to centuries.

Cold ocean conditions were found to match periods of low solar energy output, corresponding to intervals of low sunspot activity observed on the surface of the sun.

Using a physics-based climate model, the authors were able to test the response of the ocean to changes in the solar output and found similar results to the data.

Ian Hall

"By using the climate model it was also possible to explore how the changes in solar output affected the surface circulation of the Atlantic Ocean," said Prof Ian Hall, a co-author of the study.

"The circulation of the surface of the Atlantic Ocean is typically tightly linked to changes in the wind patterns."

"Analysis of the atmosphere component in the climate model revealed that during periods of solar minima there was a high-pressure system located west of the British Isles."

"This feature is often referred to as atmospheric blocking, and it is called this because it blocks the warm westerly winds diverting them and allowing cold Arctic air to flow south bringing harsh winters to Europe, such as those recently experienced in 2010 and 2013."

The study concludes that although the temperature changes expected from future solar activity are much smaller than the warming from human carbon dioxide emissions, regional climate variability associated with the effects of solar output on the ocean and atmosphere should be taken into account when making future climate projections.

More information: Solar forcing of North Atlantic surface temperature and salinity over the past millennium, Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2094