Pictures of other planets. The American painted landscapes of planets unseen by mankind. Sunrise on Triton

Doors 07.02.2024

Doors

The crescent of Jupiter slowly oscillates above the horizon of its satellite, Europa. The eccentricity of its orbit is constantly subject to disturbances due to orbital resonance with Io, which is now passing against the background of Jupiter. Tidal deformation causes deep cracks in Europa's surface and provides the moon with heat, stimulating underground geological processes that allow the subsurface ocean to remain liquid.

Sunrise on Mars

Sunrise at the bottom of one of the canyons of the Labyrinth of Night in the province of Tharsis on Mars. The reddish color of the sky is given by dust scattered in the atmosphere, consisting mainly of “rust” - iron oxides (if you apply automatic color correction in a photo editor to real photographs taken by Mars rovers, the sky on them will become a “normal” blue color. The surface stones, however, are at the same time they will acquire a greenish tint, which is not true, so it’s still correct as it is here). This dust scatters and partially refracts light, resulting in a blue halo around the Sun in the sky.

Dawn on Io

Dawn on Io, a moon of Jupiter. The snow-like surface in the foreground consists of sulfur dioxide crystals ejected to the surface in geysers similar to the one now visible beyond the nearby horizon. There is no atmosphere here that creates turbulence, which is why the geyser has such a regular shape.

Dawn on Mars

Solar eclipse on Callisto

The Sun will soon emerge from Jupiter's right edge; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of the giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish streak behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner Solar System, known to earthly observers as the “zodiacal light.”

Mercury rising

The disk of the sun from Mercury appears three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

Considering the slow rotation of this planet, before this, for several weeks from the same point it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon.

Triton

Full Neptune in the sky is the only source of light for the night side of Triton. The thin line across Neptune's disk is its rings, visible edge-on, and the dark circle is the shadow of Triton itself. The opposite edge of the depression in the middle ground is approximately 15 kilometers away.

Sunrise on Triton

"Summer" on Pluto

Despite its small size and great distance from the Sun, Pluto at times has an atmosphere. This happens when Pluto, moving along its elongated orbit, approaches the Sun closer than Neptune. During this roughly twenty-year period, some of the methane-nitrogen ice on its surface evaporates, enveloping the planet in an atmosphere rivaling that of Mars in density. On February 11, 1999, Pluto once again crossed the orbit of Neptune and again became farther from the Sun (and would now be the ninth, farthest from the Sun, planet if it had not been “demoted” in 2006 with the adoption of the definition of the term “planet”) .

Now, until 2231, it will be an ordinary (albeit the largest) frozen planetoid of the Kuiper belt - dark, covered with an armor of frozen gases, in places acquiring a reddish tint from interaction with the gamma rays of outer space.

Dangerous Dawn on Gliese 876d

Sunrises on the planet Gliese 876d can be dangerous. Although, in fact, none of humanity knows the real conditions on this planet. It orbits very close to the red dwarf variable star Gliese 876. This image shows how the artist imagined them. The mass of this planet is several times greater than the mass of the Earth, and the size of its orbit is smaller than the orbit of Mercury. Gliese 876d rotates so slowly that conditions on this planet are very different during the day and night.

It can be assumed that strong volcanic activity is possible on Gliese 876d, caused by gravitational tides, which deforms and heats the planet, and itself intensifies during the daytime.

Ship

A ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet

Gliese 581

Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, 20.4 light years away. years from Earth

As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the star can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the diameter of the Sun and a hundred times fainter.

Planetars

Planets or wandering planets are planets that do not revolve around stars, but drift freely in interstellar space.

Some of them were formed, like stars, as a result of gravitational compression of gas and dust clouds, others arose, like ordinary planets, in star systems, but were thrown into interstellar space due to disturbances from neighboring planets. Planetars should be fairly common in the Galaxy, but they are virtually impossible to detect, and most rogue planets will likely never be discovered. If the mass of the planet is 0.6-0.8 that of the Earth and higher, then it is capable of maintaining an atmosphere around itself, which will retain the heat generated by its depths, and the temperature and pressure on the surface may even be acceptable for life. Eternal night reigns on their surface.

The globular cluster along the edge of which this planet travels contains about 50,000 stars and is located not far from our own galaxy. Perhaps at its center, as in the cores of many galaxies, a supermassive black hole lurks. Globular clusters typically contain very old stars, and this planet is also likely much older than Earth.

When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life, it expands to more than 200 times its original diameter, becoming a red giant and destroying the system's inner planets.

Then, over the course of several tens of thousands of years, the star sporadically ejects its outer layers into space, sometimes forming concentric shells, leaving behind a small, very hot core that cools and contracts to become a white dwarf. Here we see the beginning of compression - the star sheds the first of its gaseous shells. This ghostly sphere will gradually expand, eventually going far beyond the orbit of this planet - the “Pluto” of this star system, which spent almost its entire history - tens of billions of years - far on its outskirts in the form of a dark dead ball covered with a layer of frozen gases.

For the last hundred million years, it has been bathed in streams of light and heat, melted nitrogen-methane ice has formed an atmosphere, and rivers of real water flow across its surface. But soon - by astronomical standards - this planet will again plunge into darkness and cold - now forever.

Gloomy landscape

Landscape of an unnamed planet drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust

The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the absence of impact craters - but after sinking into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface was reduced so much that much of the atmosphere simply froze and fell as snow. The life that once flourished here has disappeared.

Sun in the sky

The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.

By the time this global glaciation began, single-celled life already existed on Earth, and if volcanoes had not, over millions of years, saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane so much that the ice began to melt, life on Earth would still have been represented by bacteria huddling on rocky outcrops and in zones of volcanism.

Ambler

An alien world with a different geology. The formations resemble remnants of layered ice. Judging by the lack of sedimentary material in the lowlands, they were formed by melting, not weathering.

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Our planet is a real storehouse of surprises. We think we know everything about it, but sometimes we come across places where, when we get there, it’s hard to believe that this is the same planet.

website invites you to travel to different parts of the Earth, where everything looks so unusual that it seems as if we have left the confines of our cosmic home.

16. Hidden Beach, Marieta Islands, Mexico

15. Lassen Volcanic National Park, USA

In addition to alien landscapes, Lassen Volcanic National Park, located in California, is famous for the fact that it is the only place on Earth where there are all 4 types of volcanoes: a stratovolcano, a shield volcano, as well as lava and cinder cones.

14. Mount Roraima, Brazil - Venezuela - Guyana

At first glance, it may seem that in front of us is a piece of land floating freely among the clouds. In fact, this is Mount Roraima, or, as it is also called, Table Mountain. The cloud near its top never disappears, and many species of plants can only be found in the vicinity of this mountain and nowhere else.

13. Zhangye Danxia National Geopark, China

These colorful mountain “layer cakes” are the result of sandstone and other rocks layered on top of each other over 24 million years. Winds and rains over millions of years have given these mountains a variety of shapes - from rounded to cone-shaped.

12. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

The dry salt lake of Uyuni stores 10 billion tons of salt. Every year during the rainy season, Uyuni is covered with a thin layer of water and turns into the world's largest natural mirror, which is used to calibrate satellites.

11. Salvador Dali Desert, Bolivia

A lifeless desert spread over an area of more than 100 square meters. km, as if she had stepped out of the paintings of a famous genius. Smooth mountains as if painted with watercolors, strange stones resembling trees growing out of nowhere, and endless sand - it seems that this is where Dali wrote his surreal masterpieces.

10. Danakil Depression, Ethiopia

The Danakil Depression is a place that can be considered the cradle of humanity, because it was here that the remains of Lucy, the first hominid known to science, were found. Thanks to the sulfur lakes, which are home to unique microorganisms that have adapted to extreme conditions, the local landscape resembles the views of Io, one of the moons of Jupiter.

9. Wave Gallery, Arizona, USA

“Wave” is a natural gallery formed from sandstone. 200 million years ago there were sand dunes here, which, under the influence of time and natural phenomena, turned the local landscape into an alien one. Getting here is not easy - local authorities issue no more than 20 vouchers per day, which also need to be won in a lottery.

8. Valley of the Moon, Atacama Desert, Chile

The Valley of the Moon is located in one of the driest places on the planet - the Atacama Desert. The landscape of the valley is very similar to the lunar one, because even the local lakes consist exclusively of a salt crust, and stone cliffs here and there rise above the surface.

7. Flying Geyser, Nevada, USA

The Fly geothermal spring was formed due to human intervention: a mistake was made during the construction of the well, as a result of which boiling water came out. The minerals contained in it formed a “volcano” 1.5 meters high, which continues to increase in size.

6. Prohodna Cave, Bulgaria

Prohodna Cave, or "Eyes of God" is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Bulgaria. The through holes in the rock are surprisingly symmetrical and really look like eyes, especially during rain, when water begins to flow through them, resembling tears.

5. Crooked Forest, Pomerania, Poland

Almost 400 pine trees, whose trunk sharply bends strictly in the north direction a few tens of centimeters from the ground, grow in one of the forests of Poland. The origin of this phenomenon remains a mystery: some attribute it to nature, while others attribute it to the hand of man.

09.07.2012 Artist Walter Myers used scientific data to create landscapes as close to reality as possible. Thanks to his paintings we can admire the landscapes of other planets. We invite you to look at a selection of paintings by Myers and imagine that you are watching the sunrise on Mars and looking at the geysers on Jupiter’s moon Io.

1. Sunrise on Mars.

Sunrise at the bottom of one of the canyons of the Labyrinth of Night in the province of Tharsis on Mars. The reddish color of the sky is given by dust scattered in the atmosphere, consisting mainly of “rust” - iron oxides (if you apply automatic color correction in a photo editor to real photographs taken by Mars rovers, the sky on them will become a “normal” blue color. The surface stones, however, at the same time they will acquire a greenish tint, which is not true, so it’s still correct as it is here). This dust scatters and partially refracts light, resulting in a blue halo around the Sun in the sky.

2. Dawn on Io.

3. Dawn on Mars

4. Solar eclipse on Callisto.

It is the most distant of Jupiter's four large moons. It is smaller than Ganymede, but larger than Io and Europa. Callisto is also covered with a crust of ice mixed with rocks, under which there is an ocean of water (the closer to the outskirts of the solar system, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the substance of the planets, and, therefore, water), however, this satellite is practically not tormented by tidal interactions, so the surface the ice can be up to a hundred kilometers thick and there is no volcanism, so the presence of life here is unlikely. In this image we are looking at Jupiter from a position approximately 5° from Callisto's north pole. The Sun will soon emerge from Jupiter's right edge; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of the giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish streak behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner Solar System, known to earthly observers as the “zodiacal light.”

5. Jupiter - view from the Europa satellite.

The crescent moon of Jupiter slowly oscillates above the horizon of Europa. The eccentricity of its orbit is constantly subject to disturbances due to orbital resonance with Io, which is now passing against the background of Jupiter. Tidal deformation causes deep cracks in Europa's surface and provides the moon with heat, stimulating underground geological processes that allow the subsurface ocean to remain liquid.

6. Sunrise on Mercury.

The disk of the sun from Mercury appears three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

7. Considering the slow rotation of this planet, before this, for several weeks, from the same point, it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon

8. Triton.

9. Sunrise on Triton looks no less impressive:

10. "Summer" on Pluto.

Despite its small size and great distance from the Sun, Pluto at times has an atmosphere. This happens when Pluto, moving along its elongated orbit, approaches the Sun closer than Neptune. During this roughly twenty-year period, some of the methane-nitrogen ice on its surface evaporates, enveloping the planet in an atmosphere rivaling that of Mars in density. On February 11, 1999, Pluto once again crossed the orbit of Neptune and again became farther from the Sun (and would now be the ninth planet, farthest from the Sun, if in 2006, with the adoption of the definition of the term “planet”, it had not been “demoted”) . Now, until 2231, it will be an ordinary (albeit the largest) frozen planetoid of the Kuiper belt - dark, covered with an armor of frozen gases, in places acquiring a reddish tint from interaction with the gamma rays of outer space.

11. Dangerous dawn on Gliese 876d.

12. A ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet.

13. Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, at 20.4 sv. years from Earth.

The main attraction of its system is the first exoplanet discovered by scientists, Gliese 581 C, within the “habitable zone” - that is, not too close and not too far from the star for liquid water to exist on its surface. The surface temperature of the planet ranges from -3 ° C to +40°C, which means it can be habitable. The gravity on its surface is one and a half times higher than Earth’s, and the “year” is only 13 days. As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the star can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the diameter of the Sun and a hundred times fainter.

14. Planetars or wandering planets are planets that do not revolve around stars, but drift freely in interstellar space. Some of them were formed, like stars, as a result of gravitational compression of gas and dust clouds, others arose, like ordinary planets, in star systems, but were thrown into interstellar space due to disturbances from neighboring planets. Planetars should be fairly common in the Galaxy, but they are virtually impossible to detect, and most rogue planets will likely never be discovered. If the mass of the planet is 0.6-0.8 of the Earth's and higher, then it is able to retain an atmosphere around itself, which will retain the heat generated by its depths, and the temperature and pressure on the surface can be even more acceptable for life. Eternal night reigns on their surface. The globular cluster along the edge of which this planet travels contains about 50,000 stars and is located not far from our own galaxy. Perhaps at its center, as in the cores of many galaxies, a supermassive black hole lurks. Globular clusters typically contain very old stars, and this planet is also likely much older than Earth.

15. When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life, it expands to more than 200 times its original diameter, becoming a red giant and destroying the system's inner planets. Then, over the course of several tens of thousands of years, the star sporadically ejects its outer layers into space, sometimes forming concentric shells, leaving behind a small, very hot core that cools and contracts to become a white dwarf. Here we see the beginning of compression - the star sheds the first of its gaseous shells. This ghostly sphere will gradually expand, eventually going far beyond the orbit of this planet - “Pluto” of this star system, which spent almost its entire history - tens of billions of years - far on its outskirts in the form of a dark dead ball covered with a layer of frozen gases. For the last hundred million years, it has been bathed in streams of light and heat, melted nitrogen-methane ice has formed an atmosphere, and rivers of real water flow across its surface. But soon - by astronomical standards - this planet will again plunge into darkness and cold - now forever.

16. A gloomy landscape of an unnamed planet, drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust.

The light from other stars is hidden, while the solar wind from the central star of the system “inflates” the material of the nebula, creating a bubble of relatively free space around the star, which is visible in the sky in the form of a bright spot with a diameter of about 160 million km - this is a tiny hole in a dark cloud measuring light years in size.The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the absence of impact craters - but after plunging into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface decreased so much so that much of the atmosphere simply froze and fell as snow, and the life that once flourished here disappeared.

17. The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.

Discovered in 1995, Teide 1 is one of the brown dwarfs - tiny stars with a mass several tens of times less than the Sun - and is located four hundred light years from Earth in the Pleiades star cluster. Teide 1 has about 55 times the mass of Jupiter and is considered quite large for a brown dwarf. and, therefore, hot enough to support the synthesis of lithium in its depths, but it is not able to start the process of fusion of hydrogen nuclei, like our Sun. This substar has probably only existed for about 120 million years (compared to the Sun's 4,500 million years of existence), and burns at a temperature of 2,200°C - not half as hot as the Sun. The planet from which we look at Teide 1 is located at a distance of approximately 6.5 million km. There is an atmosphere and even clouds here, but it is too young for the emergence of life. The star in the sky looks ominously large, but in fact its diameter is only twice that of Jupiter. All brown dwarfs are comparable in size to Jupiter—the more massive ones are simply denser. As for life on this planet, it most likely simply will not have time to develop during the short period of active life of the star - it has about three hundred million years left, after which it will slowly smolder for another billion years at a temperature of less than a thousand degrees and will no longer be considered star.

18. Spring in Phoenix.

This world is similar to Earth... but it is deserted. Perhaps, for some reason, life did not arise here, despite favorable conditions, or perhaps life simply did not have time to give rise to developed forms and get to land.

19. Frozen world.

Some terrestrial planets may be located too far from their star to maintain a surface temperature acceptable for life. “Too far” in this case is a relative concept, it all depends on the composition of the atmosphere and the presence or absence of the greenhouse effect. There was a period in the history of our Earth (850-630 million years ago) when it was all a continuous icy desert from pole to pole, and at the equator it was as cold as in modern Antarctica. By the time this global glaciation began, single-celled life already existed on Earth, and if volcanoes had not, over millions of years, saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane so much that the ice began to melt, life on Earth would still have been represented by bacteria huddling on rocky outcrops and in volcanic zones

20. Ambler.

An alien world with a different geology. The formations resemble remnants of layered ice. Judging by the lack of sedimentary material in the lowlands, they were formed by melting, not weathering.

American artist Walter Myers was born in 1958 and has been interested in astronomy since childhood. Thanks to his paintings, drawn in accordance with scientific data, we can admire the landscapes of other planets. Here is a selection of Myers' works with his informative comments.

(Total 20 photos)

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1. Sunrise on Mars.

2. Dawn on Io.

3. Dawn on Mars

4. Solar eclipse on Callisto.

It is the most distant of Jupiter's four large moons. It is smaller than Ganymede, but larger than Io and Europa. Callisto is also covered with a crust of ice in half with rocks, under which there is an ocean of water (the closer to the outskirts of the Solar system, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the substance of the planets, and, therefore, water), however, this satellite is practically not tormented by tidal interactions, so the surface the ice can be up to a hundred kilometers thick and there is no volcanism, so the presence of life here is unlikely. In this image we are looking at Jupiter from a position approximately 5° from Callisto's north pole. The Sun will soon emerge from Jupiter's right edge; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of the giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish streak behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner Solar System, known to earthly observers as the “zodiacal light.”

5. Jupiter - view from the Europa satellite.

6. Sunrise on Mercury.

The disk of the sun from Mercury appears three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

7. Considering the slow rotation of this planet, before this, for several weeks, from the same point, it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon

8. Triton.

9. Sunrise on Triton looks no less impressive:

10. "Summer" on Pluto.

11. Dangerous dawn on Gliese 876d.

12. A ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet.

13. Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, at 20.4 sv. years from Earth.

The main attraction of its system is the first exoplanet discovered by scientists, Gliese 581 C, within the “habitable zone” - that is, not too close and not too far from the star for liquid water to exist on its surface. The planet's surface temperature ranges from -3°C to +40°C, which means it can be habitable. Gravity on its surface is one and a half times higher than Earth’s, and a “year” is only 13 days. As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the star can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the diameter of the Sun and a hundred times fainter.

16. A gloomy landscape of an unnamed planet, drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust.

The light from other stars is hidden, while the solar wind from the central star of the system “inflates” the material of the nebula, creating a bubble of relatively free space around the star, which is visible in the sky in the form of a bright spot with a diameter of about 160 million km - this is a tiny hole in a dark cloud whose dimensions are measured in light years. The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the absence of impact craters - but after sinking into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface was reduced so much that much of the atmosphere simply froze and fell as snow. The life that once flourished here has disappeared.

17. The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.

18. Spring in Phoenix.

19. Frozen world.

20. Ambler.

An alien world with a different geology. The formations resemble remnants of layered ice. Judging by the lack of sedimentary material in the lowlands, they were formed by melting, not weathering.

Birth of a planet in a system of two suns

Landscape of Mars and the polar cap region

The birth of a planet in a system of two Suns (second option)

Planet of the Blue Sun (third option)

Planet of the three sun system

Planet of the Blue Sun (fifth option)

Planet of the Big Red Sun

Planet of the Emerald Green Sun

Planet of the three sun system

Green Sun Sunset

Planet with five moons

Planet of the Green Sun. Sunrise

Supernova explosion

When the task is to talk at least briefly about the work of this or that artist, first of all you try to evaluate to what extent he managed to convey the reality of the world around him. But here - one picture, the second, the third, the tenth... Looking at the canvases, the viewer seems to be looking into windows open to completely different worlds.

Here are the planets of the Blue and Orange Suns, and here is the world of the Green Sun. Look at the following picture - and you will find yourself in the wonderful world of the Blue Sun. And this is a spectacle of truly universal proportions: the explosion of a supernova. Another canvas - and we become witnesses to the birth of an unknown planet.

All of these are works by science fiction artist G.I. Kurnin. He devoted more than twenty years of creativity to the space theme. His paintings were awarded first prize at the international competition "The World of Tomorrow". Kurnin's exhibitions have been repeatedly organized in our country and abroad. Reproductions of his paintings can be seen on the pages of popular magazines with millions of copies. Numerous letters are sent to the artist living in Sochi. Soviet and foreign admirers of his work are interested in how the idea of fantastic paintings is born, whether the artist’s canvases are only a figment of the imagination or whether his pictorial fantasies are based on scientific data, and many other questions.

It is noteworthy that cosmonauts, astronomers, physicists, space technology specialists, and science fiction writers show great interest in Kurnin’s work. Young people are also keenly interested in them.

What is it about the attention to the artist’s work from people so different in their occupation, age, character, and aesthetic needs? It seems that the answers to these questions are contained in Kurnin’s works themselves. His first painting on a space theme, “Landscape of the Moon,” appeared as the result of a unique synthesis of careful study of scientific data and creative imagination. This picture was painted even before spacecraft visited the Moon and large-scale photographs of our natural satellite went around the whole world. However, even then the artist managed to create a true picture of a world distant from us by a colossal space. However, cosmonauts and astronomers are surprised not only and not so much by this. They are attracted by the beauty and grandeur of the lunar landscape created by the artist, the variety of its colors and halftones. Before us is the pass of the lunar circus. Sharp rocks. Sharp transitions from light to shadow, softened by the glow of the matte disk of the Earth. Black velvet sky with dazzlingly bright stars. On the edge of the lunar circus there is a group of astronauts.

In this case, the artist (as, incidentally, has happened more than once in the work of science fiction writers) managed to predict what was later confirmed.

But here is another picture - “Planet of the Blue Sun”.

A bay of an extraterrestrial sea, surrounded by huge crystalline cliffs. They resemble giant structures erected by unknown creatures. A blue luminary descending beyond the horizon illuminates everything around with a flickering light. This world is unusual and strange. The sensitive ears of earthly radio telescopes have not yet heard his breathing, and spacecraft from Earth have not reached here either. Does this world really exist? There may not be an exact answer to this question, but it is possible that there is. Kurnin's fiction has real roots. The artist has read many books and articles on astronomy and the theory of interplanetary flights, space biology, rocketry, studied materials from numerous discussions on the problems of extraterrestrial civilizations, and collected information about milestone space flights.

Kurnin has been painting for a long time - more than forty years. However, the artist considers the last two decades to be the most fruitful, when he devoted himself entirely to developing the space theme. “Of course,” admits Kurnin, “I would not have been able to take it seriously if by this time I had not matured as an artist.”

Georgy Ivanovich Kurnin was born on November 26, 1915 in Tashkent into a working-class family. Kurnin's father, a highly qualified painter, was an educated man for those times. He was passionate about painting and devoted all his free time to working on sketches and reading. The future artist learned to read early, and even earlier - to draw. The first books Kurnin read were fairy tales. “The Little Humpbacked Horse”, “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”, “The Scarlet Flower”... Then there were K. Flammarion, Jules Verne, A. Belyaev, G. Wells. Princesses and knights were replaced in the future artist’s albums by drawings of spacecraft and monsters from unknown worlds. This is how Kurnin first became involved with science fiction. Kurnin's works as a student were exhibited at regional and republican exhibitions and were awarded diplomas and prizes. They were noticed by the artist S.S. Razvadovsky, who worked a lot with the young man, and after graduating from school recommended him to the Tashkent Art School. Having graduated from the painting department ahead of schedule, the young man considered himself not yet sufficiently prepared for big work. He wanted to study more deeply the work of the great masters of the past. Kurnin entered the Faculty of Theory and History of Art at Central Asian State University (now Tashkent University named after V.I. Lenin). Having received a diploma in art history, he becomes a teacher and continues to be passionate about painting. Famous artists P. P. Belkov, A. V. Nikolaev, V. I. Ufimtsev take patronage of Kurnin. First, together with them, and then independently, Kurnin travels a lot in Central Asia. During his travels, a series of his Central Asian landscapes was born.

Then misfortune befell the artist. A severe injury left him unable to move for a long time. On the urgent recommendation of doctors, Kurnin moves to the Black Sea coast, to Sochi. Then, in the early 1950s, the artist’s attention was increasingly attracted to the problems of space flight. In a modest apartment on one of the seaside streets of Sochi, the first sketches of picturesque fantastic compositions are made, which critics will later call “space symphonies.” For those years, the decision to devote my creativity to space was quite daring, since the era of exploration of interplanetary space had not yet begun, we were just standing on its threshold. Fine art in this regard had no traditions; there were no works on this topic, with the exception of illustrations for some literary works.

Kurnin’s creative portfolio includes many interesting original paintings. He started out as a genre painter. Then he devoted himself to the landscape of Central Asia. The nature of this amazing and huge region captivated him. I captivated her first of all with her contrasts. He was amazed by the riot of colors of the oases and the majestic monotony of the deserts. He was equally captivated by the stormy rhythms of life in the fertile valleys and the proud silence of the mountains. These contrasts mark Kurnin's landscapes, which he worked on in Central Asia. He also looked for contrasts later, when he moved to the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. The works created here can be called a search for the unusual in the ordinary. Here is the sea, bathed in the July sun. Deserted shore with hot pebbles. A light haze sways over the shore - barely perceptible, crystal-transparent writhing streams of air. The artist tries to make them more visible, tangible, material. In these silvery streams stretching from the hot earth, we see a kind of condensed haze, its condensation. This is a hyperbole of a natural phenomenon. The result is a feeling of not just reality, but super-reality, the special tangibility of what is happening.

Finding the unusual in the ordinary was the task Kurnin set himself while working on some earthly landscapes. Now that he turned to fantasies on cosmic themes, his creative super task can be formulated as follows: to see the familiar in the unusual. It seems that these two tasks are closely related, one is a continuation of the other. To look into a world that exists somewhere in the vast distance , into a world that is often only assumed - Kurnin’s pictorial language is subordinated to the solution of this creative problem.

The landscape “Sunset on the Planet Venus” appeared at a time when space probes were not launched towards this planet.

What did the artist know about Venus then? Kurnin reasoned approximately like this: in the presence of a powerful dense layer of the atmosphere, the sun will highlight in the clouds only the place over which it is located. High temperatures on the surface of the planet, reaching up to 500 ° C, mean that fusible metals will be in a liquid state, and rock masses will be hot and sintered. Obviously there must be volcanoes.

The coloring of the painting is in unusual reddish tones. In the foreground is a lake of molten metal, surrounded by red-hot rocks, the edges of which are also melted. Further on there are rocks, behind which you can see a gorge going deep into the depths. And above all this are low, dense clouds, through which the huge setting sun shines through.

When, many years later, astronomers who studied data from space probes launched to Venus met with the artist, they confirmed that the world of this planet should look exactly like this.

Of course, not everything in Kurnin’s pictorial fantasies can be verified by scientific data. And when else will expeditions visit planets of Blue or Green Suns, a planet with three Moons? However, do these planets exist?

The artist believes that they exist. And with the power of his images he wants to captivate and convince the viewer as well. This is how his paintings about other galaxies and encounters with unknown life forms appear. In Kurnin's paintings we sometimes see people who were not lost in the boundless expanses of the Universe, but who found what they were looking for...

All this is just a dream today. But just yesterday flights to the Moon, Venus, and Mars also seemed like a dream, but today they have become a reality!

ALEXANDER LABZIN.
Ph.D. in History of Arts

Perhaps no one in the past recorded extraordinary celestial phenomena so accurately and with such care as the ancient astronomers of the East. According to the unanimous statement of the chronicles, in 1054 a very bright guest star, never seen before, shone in the constellation Taurus.

It surpassed Venus in brilliance and for some time was the third luminary, after the Sun and Moon. It later turned out that the guest star - now called a supernova - erupted in the center of the famous Crab Nebula.

I saw this flash - the rarest phenomenon in the Universe - on the canvas of the artist Georgy Ivanovich Kurnin. An instant glow made crystalline the huge rocks and fiords approaching the sea (“Supernova Explosion”).

I do not undertake to judge Kurnin’s skill as an art critic or artist. The theme of his works is close to me as an astronaut. More than once I tried to imagine what manifestations of life could be like on other planets, in other galaxies. Kurnin shows us the worlds of the Blue Sun and Yellow Sun. Ruby-Red Sun... The works are very different in color and composition, but they all seem to have merged into a single symphony of space.

I was convinced of the veracity, so to speak, of the artist’s imagination by the accurately conveyed interweaving of light and shadow, the soft transition from one tone to another. This is exactly the iridescent range of colors that a person who has been in space sees. In contrast to the first canvas, painted in cold blue tones, “Sunset on the Planet of the Big Red Sun” appears. A huge crimson disk froze above the horizon, giving its last warmth to the liana-like plants, as if saying goodbye to it.

It was not without surprise that I learned that Georgy Ivanovich first “hears” the picture, vividly imagining the color in the music, and only then paints it. This is how Blok heard poems that had not yet been created, this is how Scriabin “tried” colors by ear.

The artist “splashes out” the cosmic plot heard and presented to the smallest detail onto a large canvas. His fantastic symphonies are laid out on spacious canvases measuring 2x3 meters.

And one more feature that distinguishes the work of this science fiction writer. You won't see space technology on his canvases. She remained somewhere outside the picture. And this, in my opinion, is naturally true. A person who has arrived on an unknown planet, about which so many have dreamed, will at first eagerly look around. Georgy Ivanovich very accurately conveys the mood of these exciting first minutes. When I looked at the canvases in the artist’s studio, I thought: only a passionate, knowledgeable, interesting person could paint something like this. And indeed, Georgy Ivanovich, who devoted more than twenty years of his life to space science fiction, turned out to be just such a person. He is unusually demanding of himself.

And I believe that years of work and persistent creative search will bring well-deserved recognition to the Sochi science fiction writer.

V. I. SEVASTYANOV
USSR pilot-cosmonaut, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Candidate of Technical Sciences

On the cover:
Supernova explosion. Fragment
Sunset on the planet Venus. Fragment

PLANETS OF DIFFERENT SUNS
16 postcards

Authors A. S. Labzin and V. I. Sevastyanov
Editor S. N. Levandovsky. Design by L. B. Kozin.
Technical editor A. M. Timoshenok.
Art editor M. A. Bychkov.
M-48544. 25.11.80. Ed. No. 669179. Circulation 50,000 copies. Order 5560. 2221211. Price 1 rub. 37 copies. Publishing house "Artist of the RSFSR". Leningrad, Bolsheokhtinsky pr.. 6, building 2.
Order of the Red Banner of Labor type. them. Volodarsky Lenizdat, Leningrad, Fontanka, 57.
Publishing house "Artist of the RSFSR" 1981