Mare Humorum

The Moon's Sea of Moisture, studied in 1875.

Chart: The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings
Plate: Plate VI
Astronomer: Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
Date: 1881
Held by: New York Public Library · via Wikimedia Commons

Plate VIfrom a study made in 1875

Format

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

Size

$29.00

The story

Plate VI of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1881, from a study Étienne Léopold Trouvelot made in 1875. Mare Humorum, the Sea of Moisture, is a lunar mare lying in an impact basin 425 kilometres across, its floor filled with basalt thought to run more than three kilometres deep at the centre. Johannes Hevelius had named it Sinus Sirbonis two centuries before. No Apollo crew ever sampled it, so its age is still read from the map, at about 3.9 billion years. In 1875 Trouvelot was given a year at the 26-inch refractor of the U.S. Naval Observatory. This is the Moon at arm's length.

See it on your wall

A window onto the heavens, in your home

Mare Humorum printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain chart held by New York Public Library · 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