The Astronomical Adventures of Artistic Nathaniel Everett Green

Abstract

Art and astronomy have always been close allies. Sir William Herschel famously quipped that: “seeing to some degree is an art that must be mastered.” The great American lens maker and founder of a telescope dynasty, Alvan Clark, was a portrait painter by profession before he turned his hand to fashioning some of the finest refractors of the 19th century. And across the pond in England, a landscape artist of considerable ability set his hand to recording the surface features of the bright planets in extraordinary detail (Fig. 16.1).