#Astronomical phenomena in art professional
#Astronomical phenomena in art series

Our course traces the shared, often symbiotic, history of these two ways of knowing, combining scientific instruction with examination of art in a range of genres and traditions, including visual art, music, and theater. The authors of this paper, over the past few years, have developed and team-taught an interdisciplinary course titled Cosmic Visions: The Science of Astronomy and the Arts. Though we tend to conceptualize art and science as separate spheres, the observation of the heavens has always been interwoven with culture, and artists and astronomers continue to draw inspiration from one another even today. Since the dawn of recorded history, stargazing has shaped-and been shaped by-our understanding of the universe and the place of humans within it. Henebry & Millard Baublitz, Boston University, College of General Studies Available as a print.Cosmic Visions: Bridging Science and Art Charles W. Phases of Venus and Saturn by Maria Clara Eimmart. Phases of the Moon by Maria Clara Eimmart. I have made some of Eimmart’s etchings, which are in the public domain, available as art prints, with all proceeds benefitting the endeavor to build New York City’s first-ever public observatory at Pioneer Works: Phases of Jupiter and Mercury by Maria Clara Eimmart. Complement it with Johannes Hevelius’s pioneering 17th-century map of the moon and the Solar System quilt that a 19th-century Iowa woman spent seven years embroidering in order to use it as a teaching tool in her astronomy lectures to women, then revisit contemporary artist Lia Halloran’s stunning cyanotype tribute to trailblazing women in astronomy.

Some of Eimmart’s art appears in Michael Benson’s altogether splendid Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time. A year later, at only thirty-one, Eimmart died in childbirth - a common tragedy at the time - leaving behind some stunning astronomical engravings of the Moon, the planets of the Solar System, comets, and the atmospheric optical phenomena paraselene and parhelion, Latin for “beside the Moon” and “beside the Sun,” commonly known as moon dog and sun dog. In her thirtieth year - an old maid by the era’s standards - she married one of his father’s pupils, a budding physicist who would eventually come to direct the observatory. Among them are the phases of Venus, Galileo’s observations of which furnished the first nail in the coffin of the geocentric model of the universe less than a century earlier.

#Astronomical phenomena in art series

The young Maria Clara began apprenticing with her father both as an artist and an astronomer, assisting in his observations and creating pictorial depictions of his data.īetween her late teens and her mid-twenties - around the time her compatriot Maria Sibylla Merian was revolutionizing entomology with her own work as a self-taught artist and naturalist - Eimmart created a series of exquisite, detailed illustrations of celestial objects. A successful engraver, draughtsman, and painter with a passion for astronomy, he spent most of his earnings on astronomical instruments and eventually built a small observatory on the city walls of Nuremberg, where he served as director of the Academy of Art.

Like Margaret Fuller, Eimmart benefitted from the love and intellectual generosity of a father who equipped her with a rigorous foundation of French, Latin, mathematics, and art. She went on to become an artist, engraver, and astronomer who produced some of the most striking astronomical art since the invention of the telescope, in a time when humanity had no idea that the universe contained galaxies other than our own.

#Astronomical phenomena in art professional

Born in Germany in an era when no woman could obtain a formal education in science anywhere in the world, Maria Clara Eimmart (May 27, 1676–October 29, 1707) predated Caroline Herschel - the world’s first professional woman astronomer - by a century.