Thomas Wright was a British astronomer who made some sharp predictions — while looking at the Milky Way and other nebulae back in the mid-18th-century, he was the first to surmise they were actually huge collections of stars.
He was also an amazing artist, and in his 1750 book "An Original Theory" he laid out his ideas on the structure of the cosmos, illustrating it with gorgeous drawings of the planetary orbits and galaxies he'd observed.
The Public Domain Review has a post with gorgeous scans from his book here, well worth checking out! A few of my faves include this drawing of the Pleiades …
… a drawing of Saturn's rings …
… and then some of his more trippy, whoa-dude illustrations, where he starts to speculate about the shape of the cosmos outside the solar system. This next one is "A perspective View of the visible Creation, including the regions around our Sun, Syrius and Rigel. The rest is a promiscuous Disposition of all the Variety of other Systems within our finite Vision, as they are supposed to be posited behind one another, in the infinite Space, and round every visible Star."
Damn …
… and then at the end, he just blows the lid off and illustrates what is basically god, existing outside and around all creation:
Dude did not lack for ambition, and he is one hell of a stylist.
If you enjoy this last one, the Public Domain Review sells it as a poster print! In fact they sell a few of Wright's images as prints — go to their page showing all the images they've captured from his book, and several have "buy as print" …
