The Great Comet of 1881

Comet Tebbutt at half past one, the night it blazed over the north.

Chart: The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings
Plate: Plate XI
Astronomer: Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
Date: 1881
Held by: MLibrary Digital Collections · via Wikimedia Commons

Plate XIas observed June 25 to 26, 1881, 1.30 a.m.

Format

The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Plate XI of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1881. John Tebbutt, an amateur astronomer, discovered the comet at Windsor, New South Wales, on May 22, 1881, and it was followed in the southern sky until June 11. By June 22 it had come into the northern night, plain to the naked eye. On June 25 its tail ran about 25 degrees, and that night, at half past one in the morning of the 26th, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot drew it. The plate went into a portfolio published that same year: news of the sky, printed in colour while the comet was still fresh in memory.

See it on your wall

A window onto the heavens, in your home

The Great Comet of 1881 printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

The Great Comet of 1881 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain chart held by MLibrary Digital Collections · via Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright.
Printed to order on EMA matte art paper, 200gsm. Framed pieces sit in a box frame under acrylic, with no mount (gold-ink editions on specialist press).
Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our charts cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the gold figures, the tiny stars, the cartouches — on a matte sheet that shows every line without glare.

From the same astronomer