The Planet Saturn

Saturn and its rings at dusk on the last day of November, 1874.

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

Plate Xas observed November 30, 1874, 5.30 p.m.

Format

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

Size

$29.00

The story

Plate X of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1881, from Étienne Léopold Trouvelot's observation of November 30, 1874, at half past five in the evening. Saturn carries the widest and most complex ring system of any planet: particles from micrometres to metres across, almost all of them water ice, and none of it visible to the naked eye. Galileo saw the rings first, in 1610, and could not make out what they were. In 1655 Christiaan Huygens was the first to describe them as a disk around the planet. Two centuries after Huygens, Trouvelot set them down in pastel on a November evening.

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The Planet Saturn 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