melancholic-aesthetics:Charles Piazzi Smyth - The Great Comet (1843)“A night-time view showing an ey
melancholic-aesthetics:Charles Piazzi Smyth - The Great Comet (1843)“A night-time view showing an eyewitness account of the Great Comet of 1843, painted by the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth.Smyth was an astronomer, geodesist, spectroscopist, meteorologist, pyramidologist, photographer, traveller and writer.Since the main purpose of the painting was to show the comet, the sky dominates the image. The comet formed a disk and Smyth described its nucleus as ‘a planetary disk, from which rays emerged in the direction of the tail’. He observed that to the naked eye it appeared to have a double tail, with the two streamers proceeding from the head in perfectly straight lines. The tail of the comet holds the record for actual extent and the sighting was notable because of the intensity of light, apparently outshining any comet seen in the previous seven centuries, as well as for the length of its tail. The painting shows the dramatic affect of the phenomenon, and the brilliance of the stars, and red of the sunset continues the affect. A figure can be seen in the foreground, standing at the edge of the viewing platform to look at the comet with the range of mountains in the distance, glowing red. The relative scale of man to mountain emphasizes the magnititude of the incident. “Source: http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/15561.html -- source link