Solar Protuberances

Fire at the Sun's edge at twenty to ten one May morning, 1873.

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

Plate IIas observed May 5, 1873, 9.40 a.m.

Format

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

Size

$29.00

The story

Plate II of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1881, observed by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot on May 5, 1873, at twenty to ten in the morning. Protuberances, now called prominences, are great loops of plasma and magnetic field anchored in the Sun's surface and reaching out into the corona, hundreds of thousands of kilometres long. They form over about a day and can hold for weeks or months. To the naked eye they show only during a total eclipse. Trouvelot had joined the Harvard College Observatory the year before, and the Sun was the subject he cared for most. This is the second plate he gave it.

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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