Travel the Planets with Willy Ley Space Scientist, You're gonna love this! Options

[karolp]

Enjoy:

Original vintage Willy Ley 1960s documentary

[Paolo Amoroso]

Original vintage Willy Ley 1960s documentary

Speaking of which, he anticipated some views from Mars actually imaged a few decades later by the MER rovers.

My friend Giuseppe De Chiara owns a copy of L'esplorazione di Marte (the exploration of Mars), the 1959 Italian edition of the 1956 original book by Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun illustrated by Chesley Bonestell.

An illustration of the book shows a diagram of how a simultaneous transit of Phobos and Deimos might look like on Mars. The caption says more or less:

5 s after contact -- 10 s later -- 10 s still later

On Mars there can not be a total eclipse of the Sun. When its two small moons pass between the Sun and Mars, they look like simple tiny black spots on the solar disc. (Lucien Rudaux.)

Similar transits of Phobos and transits of Deimos were imaged decades later by the Spirit and Opportunity Martian rovers.

I wonder what other planetary views imagined by early space exploration popularizers and pioneers were actually imaged by probes.


Paolo Amoroso