Bruce Wilson Jr.

Gazing at the Night Sky Images
For millennia, humans have charted the stars. Explore the night sky in images.

In 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts did not land on the moon. But they did capture the first image of the Earth rising over the lunar surface.

Galileo's first drawings of the moon emphasized its craters and rough surface. At the time, astronomers believed the moon was perfectly smooth.

Stonehenge stands on the Salisbury Plains, where it has fascinated visitors for generations. The structures date back as early as 3,000 BCE.

The Dunhuang star map, created around 700 CE, combined more than 1,000 years of observations, including stars cataloged by Shi Shen in the 4th century BCE.

A medieval German woodcut from the 1480s showing an ancient Greek view of the
heavens––the moon rotates in the sphere closest to the Earth, followed by the planets and Sun, with a sphere of the fixed stars beyond it. Finally, the top of the image shows Heaven.

A 16th-century engraving of Venus by the German artist Sebald Beham. The engraving connects the Roman goddess Venus with the zodiac and was part of a larger series about the planets.

The ceiling of Senenmut's tomb captures Egyptian astronomical knowledge around 1460 BCE. The image includes protective deities, represented as constellations, and planets.

A 15th-century depiction of the planet Mars from an Italian astronomy text shows the enduring link between the planet and war.

In a 1636 portrait, Galileo clutches his telescope in one hand. The invention made Galileo famous––and transformed what scientists thought about the universe.

In The Starry Messenger, Galileo reported on his findings using the telescope. Here, he drew images of the moon that highlighted its topography, including craters.

Johannes Hevalius unveiled his 150-foot telescope in 1673. The instrument attracted gawkers from miles around.

Constructed in the 1490s, the astronomical clock in St. Mark's Square, Venice showed more than the hour. It also showed the position of the five known planets, the moon's phases, and the sun's position in the zodiac.

A zodiac wheel that dates back to the 6th century. The mosaic, done in the Byzantine style, decorated the floor of the Beth Alpha synagogue in modern Israel.

The geocentric universe, as shown in a 1568 illustration by Bartolomeu Velho. Even 25 years after Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, few adopted the new model.

Epicycles, or circular orbits around a larger orbit, helped ancient and medieval astronomers explain retrograde motion. A 19th-century text shows how the theory worked.

Andreas Cellarius credited Copernicus with developing a sun-centered solar system in his 1661 chart.

Justus Sustermans painted a portrait of Galileo Galilei at the end of the scientist's life. At the time, Galileo was under house arrest in Florence. Galileo's legacy would forever be tied with the telescope and his trial.

The three models of the universe competed in the late 16th and 17th centuries. On the left, the Ptolemaic universe shows the Earth at the center, while the middle image shows the Ptolemaic system. The model on the right shows Brahe's compromise where the sun rotates around the Earth while the other planets rotate around the sun.

The cover of Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems shows three characters: Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio, debating the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems.

An 1857 painting by Cristiano Banti frames Galileo's trial as a showdown between science and religion.

Vincent van Gogh used Venus as the inspiration for The Starry Night. After spotting the planet shining bright in the night sky, he painted one of the most famous artworks in history.

Giotto's c. 1306 fresco shows the Adoration of the Magi. The Italian artist chose to represent the Star of Bethlehem as a comet crossing the sky above the manger.

The Eagle Nebula, as captured by the Hubble Telescope. NASA assigned colors to different elements: blue for oxygen, red for sulfur, and green for nitrogen and hydrogen. The image also makes ultraviolet light visible.

The Bayeux Tapestry, created a decade after the Norman Conquest, shows Halley's Comet, which appeared in 1066.

A destructive earthquake hit the city of Istanbul in 1556––just five days after a comet appeared in the sky. Many interpreted the comet as a warning sign.

The English weren't the only ones terrified by comets. This 1687 woodcut shows a comet appearing over a Hungarian town occupied by the Ottomans. The sky contains a skull and crossbones, a coffin, and a thunderstorm to link the comet with death and destruction.

A man crawls to the edge of the atmosphere to peek out into the heavens at "the point where heaven and Earth meet," in this 1888 engraving from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère.

Around 1900, astronomer Percival Lowell grew convinced that the surface of Mars showed signs of intelligent life. The canals of Mars, as Lowell termed them, were proof of extraterrestrial life.

The "Great Moon Hoax" of 1835 convinced readers of the New York Sun that man-bats lived on the moon.

A 2015 photograph of Pluto sent back from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. From its discovery in 1930 until 2006, Pluto was classified as the ninth planet. Today, scientists consider it a dwarf planet.

The cover image on Giuseppe Piazzi's book announcing the discovery of a new planet. Ceres appears in the sky as a cupid spots the planet through a telescope.

A 1928 newspaper reports on the sighting of a new planet by astronomer William Pickering. There was only one problem. Pickering hadn't found a planet at all. Not yet. Two years later, an unknown astronomer spotted Pluto.

Katherine Johnson worked at NASA for decades. She was one of thousands of women working behind the scenes to put a man on the moon.

Women worked as "human calculators" to keep the Harvard College Observatory running in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For their meticulous, difficult work, the women received half the salary of male employees.

Jerrie Cobb outscored Mercury 7 astronauts on her training tests––but NASA refused to put a woman in space. Known as the Mercury 13 or the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, the American women had to watch as the Soviets trained women astronauts.

On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. Astronaut Neil Armstrong captured this photo of Aldrin.

The Apollo 8 mission was the first to reach the moon, though the astronauts never landed. During the mission, Bill Anders snapped a picture of Earth with the moon's surface in the foreground––a perspective no human had ever seen before.

Margaret Hamilton stands next to the computer program she and her team wrote to land a lunar module on the moon.

A 2019 illustration showing the MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars. The MAVEN mission is collecting information about Mars's atmosphere.

A photograph from Venera 9 showing the surface of Venus. The image was sent back from the probe in 1975.

Curiosity poses for a selfie next to Mont Mercou on Mars. The rover took 60 images with its robotic arm and another 11 with its head. The image shows the composite of those pictures.

A spherical spacecraft carried two men to the moon in H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, published in 1901.

The space station designed for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Based on a concept developed by Werner Von Braun, the station orbited 200 miles above the Earth.
