Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.21001

    Mountains of the solar system

    Date
    1799
    Creator
    Wilson Lowry (1762 - 1824, British) , Engraver
    Object type
    Library reference
    9183
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (print): 210mm
    width (print): 240mm
    Subject
    Description
    Comparative chart of the heights of mountains on the Earth, the Moon, and Venus. With figures of the planets, showing supposed diameters at their respective equators.

    The author supposes that the highest mountain on Earth is ‘Chimboraco’ [Chimborazo, Ecuador] in the Andes of South America. The estimates of lunar mountain heights, and those supposed to be on Venus (the surface of which is obscured by atmosphere) where made ‘by the projection of the shadows formed by these mountains when they begin to appear on their horizon in regard to us, or when they are about to disappear below the horizon’.

    Plate 8, illustrating the paper: ‘On the comparative height of the mountains of the Earth, the Moon, and Venus’, The Philosophical Magazine…[edited] by Alexander Tilloch, v.4, (1799) pp.393-394.

    Inscribed above: ‘Philo. Mag. Pl.VIII. Vol. IV’. Inscribed below right: ‘Lowry sculp’.

    Johann Hieronymus Schröter (1745-1816), German astronomer, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1798.

    Wilson Lowry (1762-1824), British engraver and geologist, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1812.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > Germany
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