Digital painting of Jupiter, as it appeared from Earth on 1880 November 1st at 9:00 EST. Based on an illustration by Étienne Trouvelot published in 1882.
The Great Red Spot is seen here as an enormous red-orange oval three Earth-diameters across. It is a hurricane-like storm in Jupiter's atmosphere that by 1880 was only a few decades old. It has lasted all the way through to the modern day, although it has been shrinking ever since.
This image also depicts a double-transit of the Galilean moons Io and Europa, along with their shadows.
More info, including the reference illustration, below the cut:
My previous drawing of 1880s Jupiter was a hybrid of various late 19th century depictions of the planet. But the fact that it didn't really depict Jupiter as it ever actually looked was bugging me, so I decided to do a study on one of the drawings I used as reference for the previous drawing: Trouvelot's drawing of a double moon/shadow transit on Jupiter on November 1st 1880.
This is a pastel illustration from Étienne Trouvelot's 1882 book The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, based on observations he made with the 26" Great Refractor at the U.S. Naval Observatory in 1880.
In my astronomy circles this is a notorious image for how exaggerated and cartoony its features are. I think that's what really drew me to this image in particular. There's so much detail here... but none of it looks at all realistic. So what did it really look like that would have led to the very... creative depiction by Trouvelot?
I used Stellarium desktop to get an accurate view of Jupiter at the proper time. (You can barely make out the date on the scanned drawing. I can't read the time, so I set Stellarium to the time that most closely matched the drawing.)
This gave me the lighting angle (slightly gibbous on the antispinward limb), tilt of the bands (bowed down towards the south), and the accurate positions and sizes of the satellites and their shadows. I did not use the texture as reference.
I usually start by getting the shading right before moving on to surface features. In this case there was limb darkening all around, but a little darker on the antispinward side.
Then I started to work on the features, using mostly Trouvelot's drawing but also some modern imagery for reference on the finer details.
The black beads on Trouvelot's drawing correspond to the latitudes where we see elongated oval 'brown barges,' a type of storm found largely in the northern hemisphere of Jupiter. The billowing clouds on the equator look like an exaggerated view of the arching swirling festoons sometimes visible on the equatorial zone. The dark North & South Equatorial Belts were interpreted as both being partly covered by white cloud layers, in order to result in the particular banding pattern seen in the drawing. The scale of the Red Spot was taken from photos and sketches of around the same time which were not quite so exaggerated.
Here's some variants on the final image:
Here it is in the traditional north = up view.
This one is a zoomed out view which also shows Ganymede & Callisto
And this one is a simulation of what Trouvelot's view that night actually might have looked like. I assume perfect seeing conditions (in reality there would be more turbulence in Earth's atmosphere than depicted here, but this is a sort of best case scenario). A 26" f/15 refractor would actually have quite a lot of chromatic aberration, so I simulated that, and added a yellow filter both to match the drawing and to cut the C.A. a bit.
If you look at the simulation in fullscreen, it would be at (very roughly) the same image scale as what Trouvelot may have seen.
(CORRECTION: see note at end of post. Trouvelot in fact only had access to the USNO's 26" refractor in 1875, not 1880.)
The same view zoomed in so you don't have to go fullscreen.
And finally, a faux photograph version:
EDIT: There has been a development!
I found this image on google, behind a paywall, on what appears to be a biography of E.E. Barnard.
I assume therefore this is a drawing by Barnard. From wikipedia, it seems like the instrument available to him at that time would have been a personally owned 5" achromatic refractor. I feel the drawing depicts a plausible amount of detail visible in a 5" refractor, given my experience with a 6" Newtonian.
And that makes me wonder. Did Trouvelot in fact observe Jupiter, or was his illustration a reproduction of Barnard's sketch? It seems a mighty coincidence that of the two drawings I could find of Jupiter from 1880, they were both drawings of almost exactly the same moment. The one difference is that the moons are on the opposite side, but I suppose it's possible the observer was using a star diagonal. (I didn't think those were in common use in the 1800s though.)
In fact I now see on wikipedia, of Trouvelot: "In 1875, he was invited to use the U. S. Naval Observatory to use the 26-inch refractor for a year." So Trouvelot didn't use the Great Refractor in 1880 after all.
Anyway this is clearly a more realistic, if less detailed, sketch of the planet than what Trouvelot produced. I wish I had found this before I'd made my painting. Though that said, aside from the shape of the red spot being less rectangular and more lenticular, I'm honestly not sure I would have changed very much. If anything this sketch lends plausibility to the way I depicted Jupiter.
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An eclipse you don't need special glasses to look at? Yes, it's possible — come to the State Library to look at these incredible Trouvleot Astronomical Drawings, which include this beautiful solar eclipse!
To learn more about Trouvelot's Astronomical Drawings, visit: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-trouvelot-astronomical-drawings-1882/
(Our Trouvelot collection does not come with European Gypsy Moths.)
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Okay, so E.L. Truvelout didn’t just create beautiful, astronomical illustrations (like the ones on view now in “Radiant Beauty”) - he ALSO published this manual filled with scientific observations for each celestial subject. Here are his notes on The Planet Jupiter, observed on Nov. 1, 1880, at 9:30 p.m.
key passage:
“Two of Jupiter’s four moons present bright disks near the planet’s western limb, and cast their shadows far eastward on the disk, that of the “second satellite” falling upon the Red Spot. On the Red Spot are seen in addition two small black spots, no explanation of which can yet be offered.”
....WE HAVE AN EXPLANATION YOU GUYS
images:
E. L. Trouvelot (1827–1895), observations notes on The Planet Jupiter from The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual, published in 1882 as a companion to his series of astronomical lithographs.
E. L. Trouvelot (1827–1895), The Planet Jupiter (details), 1881, color lithograph, 25 ¾ × 32 ¾ in. Jay T. Last Collection, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Gif’d by The Huntington.
