Astrophotography allows us to become citizens of the universe.
We can see Jupiter's cloudscape at a glimpse. We can see the shifting sands of Mars, or we can go across the lunar surface.
It's a gift that's easy to overlook. It took the creative hand of a talented artist to preserve what only a few could see.
After fleeing to America following Napoleon Bonaparte's coup, Trouvelot returned to his passion for art and astronomy, only to find that his new home would be destroyed by his interest in entomology.
At a time when photography was in its infancy and even the best telescopes were little more than finely crafted lens, there was no substitute for a generous dose of artistic license when it came to preserving what the eye saw.
"A well-trained eye alone is capable of seizing the delicate details of structure and configuration of the heavenly bodies, which are liable to be affected, and even rendered invisible, by the slightest changes in our atmosphere," wrote the author of his work.
Few people can see the beauty of stars and gas clouds like he can.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
Many of us are familiar with his mapping of the Moon's texture, but rarely see it up close.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
The most common sight is a river of stars, but it is turned into a majestic scene.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
Our respect for an astronomer and our judgement as an ecological villain are both deserving of the mixed legacy of Trouvelot.
It's not without irony that a man noted for his views on distant objects could have made a mistake in his own backyard.
Prior to the 1860s, the European gypsies were only an Old World pest.
It chews its way through thousands of square kilometers of greenery in the north-eastern US each year, putting up to 300 different species of tree and shrub at risk. In the past half a century, the gypsy moth grub defoliated more than 83 million acres of forest in a range that now extends from the Atlantic coast to the centre of Wisconsin.
The introduction of the moth to the US seems trivial.
He spent his free days breeding silkworms, perhaps to supplement his income or as a personal interest.
What started as a hobby quickly became an enterprise. By the end of the Civil War, Trouvelot claimed to have fed a million young silkworms on five acres of woodland.
He began to consider ways to breed a more robust, faster-breeding grub after he realized how much his livestock of grubs were being eaten by the birds. With so many oak trees on his property, his attention was turned to a European moth that fed on the tree's foliage and produced young that wouldn't be so attractive to predators.
Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 is a repository of information.
It's not clear how the sample of gypsies came to America. It doesn't really matter. Around 1867, Trouvelot began experimenting with an insect in his home. And, by at least one account, outside of it.
It was a gust of wind that blew the eggs out of the woods. According to an investigation by a state ornithologist tasked with extinguishing the glowing embers of a moths invasion, the moths were already outside.
The error would cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in the US today.
The first plagues of moths appeared in Medford in the late 19th century, but Trouvelot had already given up his entomological experiments.
From silkworms to Sun spots.
Time travelers going back to Philadelphia in 1876 should stop at the exhibition.
The first World's Fair to be officially held in the nation featured Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, as well as the Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo and the Statue of Liberty. There was a display on current trends in agriculture and a display on novel foods.
There was a sample of pastels by the astronomer and lithographer E. L. Trouvelot.
His method was simple and effective, relying on an etched grid across his field of vision to coordinate the major features of his subject.
The director of the Harvard College Observatory, Joseph Winlock, had seen Trouvelot's talents a few years before. In 1872, Winlock invited Trouvelot to join their staff and he used their telescope.
Around 7,000 illustrations were produced by Trouvelot.
We were barely starting to comprehend features of planets in our own neighborhood when some of the recordings were made.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
Something as familiar as an eclipse takes on a new look through another's eyes.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
These sun-spot discoveries, which he describes as "veiled" Sun-spot, were attributed to him in their own right.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
A drawing of the Leonid meteor shower drawn in 1868 has the shower's stars curving and dog-legging at odd angles across the sky.
The public domain contains tienne Léopold Trouvelot.
It's a mystery why he drew it this way, according to 'The Bad Astronomer' Phil Plait.
Plait told ScienceAlert that it's possible he was seeing trains, the glowing rock from the meteoroid that can last for several minutes.
High-level winds can blow those into weird and twisted shapes. That takes time, so the fact that he drew a bright head on them may have been an artistic interpretation.
Modern photography captures what an artist would take time to think about. Small details like these preserve a perspective over objective observations.
Charles Scribner's Sons published The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual in 1882. It would be the year that Trouvelot would return to France to live out his last years.
There are many inspiring stories and cautionary tales in the history of science. It's rare to find them sitting side-by-side in the same biography.
