Monday 14 January 2019

This Painting,

might look oddly familiar,


 it was, like the other paintings in this post, painted by Charles Bittinger, but here is the thing, at the time he painted it and it appeared in a 1939 edition of National Geographic, it has to be remembered that at that time telescopes were advanced enough to reveal details of the moon, but it would be another 30 years before a human would set foot there, not even a satellite had been launched at the time the piece was published, despite the fact that humans hadn’t yet begun to explore outer space, the paintings illuminate how much scientists already understood, in the painting of Earth as seen from the moon, for example, the ridges on the moon’s craters are raised, which planetary scientist Bethany Ehlmann says is “very technically correct.”

this is the real deal, this photograph was taken on July 20, 1969, the view from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising above the moon's horizon, which looks uncannily like the painting by Charles Bittinger, 

 the paintings were featured in July 1939, when National Geographic published a story called “News of the Universe,” for which artist Charles Bittinger was commissioned to create a series of paintings that would help readers visualize outer space,

how amazing that with no knowledge apart from reading he could visualize outer space, or like the painting above could visualize the earth when the asteroid or comet impact that created Arizona's famous Meteor Crater, the constellation of Orion, the hunter, hangs in the upper right.


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