Space Art · Gallery 7
NASA/ Rick Guidice · Public domainSpace Art Through the Ages
Long before cameras reached the planets, people drew the sky: on bronze, on silk, on copper plates, in chalk and in airbrush. Click any picture to enlarge it.
By Christopher Adkins · · 200+ works in ten rooms
Art and astronomy grew up together. For most of history the only way to record what was in the sky was to draw it, and the people who did so were often making something to be admired as well as used. This gallery follows the sky in pictures from about 1600 BC to the present. Every work shown is in the public domain or openly licensed; each caption carries its credit.
c. 1600 BCThe Nebra sky disc, oldest known depiction of the cosmos
1603Bayer’s Uranometria, first atlas of the whole sky
1610Galileo draws the Moon through a telescope
1881Trouvelot’s color plates
1975NASA’s space-colony paintings
The Nebra sky disc, about 1600 BC
A bronze disc 32 centimeters across, inlaid with gold: a sun or full moon, a crescent, and a cluster of seven dots usually read as the Pleiades. Found by treasure hunters on the Mittelberg hill in central Germany in 1999 and recovered by police in 2002, it is the oldest known concrete depiction of the heavens. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register in 2013.
The Dunhuang star chart, Tang dynasty China
A paper scroll from about AD 700, found in the Mogao caves on the Silk Road and now in the British Library. It maps more than 1,300 stars visible from north China and is the oldest complete star atlas to survive from any civilization.
Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, 1610
In the winter of 1609–10 Galileo Galilei turned a telescope of his own making on the Moon and drew what he saw: mountains, craters and shadows on a world long assumed to be a perfect sphere. His short book, the “Starry Messenger,” also reported four moons circling Jupiter.
Johann Bayer, Uranometria, 1603
Published in Augsburg, this was the first atlas to cover the entire sky, with 51 copperplate charts engraved by Alexander Mair. Bayer labeled the stars of each constellation with Greek letters, a system astronomers still use: Alpha Centauri is his.
Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660
Printed in Amsterdam by Johannes Janssonius, its 29 hand-colored double-page plates set out the rival world systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe alongside maps of the constellations. It is often called the most beautiful celestial atlas ever made.
Urania’s Mirror, 1824
A boxed set of 32 constellation cards published in London and engraved by Sidney Hall. Holes punched at the positions of the stars let you hold a card to a lamp and see the constellation shine through.
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1881–82
A French artist working at Harvard College Observatory and the U.S. Naval Observatory, Trouvelot made some 7,000 astronomical drawings. Fifteen of the finest were issued as chromolithographs by Charles Scribner’s Sons: sunspots, the planets, comets and the Milky Way, drawn at the eyepiece just before photography took over.
Space colonies, NASA Ames, 1975
In the summer of 1975 NASA’s Ames Research Center and Stanford hosted a study of how thousands of people might live in orbit. Artists Rick Guidice and Don Davis painted the results: rotating wheels and cylinders with farms, rivers and suburbs inside. The paintings shaped a generation’s idea of the future.
Visions of the Future, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2016
A set of travel posters in the style of the 1930s, made by JPL’s design studio, advertising holidays on worlds the laboratory’s spacecraft have explored or discovered. NASA released them free for anyone to print.
The Exoplanet Travel Bureau
A companion series from NASA imagining tourism to real planets around other stars, including the TRAPPIST-1 system and Kepler-186f.
Questions people ask
What is the oldest known depiction of the sky?
The Nebra sky disc, a bronze and gold disc made in central Europe about 1600 BC, is the oldest known concrete depiction of astronomical objects.
Are NASA images and artwork free to use?
Most NASA-produced images and artwork are not copyrighted and may be used freely, subject to NASA’s media guidelines. Works by outside artists or partner agencies can carry other terms.
Who was Étienne Trouvelot?
A French-born artist and astronomer (1827–1895) who produced thousands of astronomical drawings at American observatories, fifteen of which were published as celebrated color lithographs in 1881–82.
Sources and further reading
- NASA JPL: Visions of the Future posters
- NASA Ames: Space Settlement art from the 1970s — hosted by the National Space Society
- British Library: The Dunhuang Star Chart
- State Museum of Prehistory, Halle: Nebra Sky Disc
- Wikimedia Commons (image files and licenses)
About the author. Christopher Adkins is an attorney at Adkins Law, PLLC in Huntersville, North Carolina, a former Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer and a former U.S. Army engineer officer. He writes and edits The Lake Norman Brief, where the Outer Space collection sits beside the site’s history, Lake Norman and law sections. Corrections are welcome through the site’s contact page.