The Zodiacal Light

Sunlight on interplanetary dust, drawn from a dark February sky.

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

Plate Vas observed February 20, 1876

Format

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

Size

$29.00

The story

Plate V of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, published as chromolithographs by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York in 1881. Étienne Léopold Trouvelot watched this glow on February 20, 1876, in his years on the staff of the Harvard College Observatory. The zodiacal light is sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust: a faint cone that rises from the Sun's direction along the zodiac, and only in a particularly dark sky. Seen before sunrise it was called the false dawn. Trouvelot drew it first in pastel, the medium behind every one of the fifteen plates, and the printer carried the colour across. A glow most people never notice, held on paper for good.

See it on your wall

A window onto the heavens, in your home

The Zodiacal Light 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