Thomas Wright's gorgeous 1750 drawings of the cosmos

Thomas Wright was a British astronomer who made some sharp predictions — while looking at the Milky Way and other nebulae back in the mid-18th-century, he was the first to surmise they were actually huge collections of stars.

He was also an amazing artist, and in his 1750 book "An Original Theory" he laid out his ideas on the structure of the cosmos, illustrating it with gorgeous drawings of the planetary orbits and galaxies he'd observed. — Read the rest