Machu Picchu—the Intihuatana or Hitching Post of the Sun
At the June solstice, the Incas tied a ray around this stone, so that Inti the Sun would not depart any farther north. The Urubamba River is 2,000 feet below, and tourists arrive by the railway station down there and then a bus up. I descended to Machu Picchu from 4,000 feet above, having walked for three days along the remains of an Inca road of slabs among the peaks of the Andes and often above the clouds. (Cover picture for Astronomical Calendar 1987, after I had gone to see Halley's Comet from Bolivia and Peru.)

Midsummer sunrise at Stonehenge
We were allowed to be alone there for the 3:45 a.m. sunrise so that I could paint this picture for my Astronomical Calendar 2003.
The towering stone on the left once formed the "grand trilithon" with the fallen one to its right. The tenon on the great stone's top, by which the lintel stone was connected, is Stonehenge's highest point. Seen through this trilithon and perhaps across an altar, the sun rises through an outer trilithon and above the distant Heel Stone in the north-east.
Actually it was the day before the solstice, or we could not have had it to ourselves. On midsummer morning itself, 22,000 people were there. And sixty security persons, positioned to stop revellers from damaging the stones—or hurting the chicks of the two pairs of jackdaws that we saw nesting in the crevices.

I included this diagram of the inner rings of Stonehenge. In the book, unfortunately, a printer's error removed the gray. The blue arrow is the northeastward axis
The same alignment, in the opposite direction, could have been used to observe the midwinter solstice sunset, the farthest south. Wouldn't this have had the same anxious importance that it had for the Incas?

Also this impression of Stonehenge as we first beheld it on the horizon, the evening before. (This had to be printed without color.) We came riding along the bicycle-unfriendly highway that roars across Salisbury Plain toward southwestern England. Terrifying highway and looming cloud set an uneasy mood, but the following dawn was fine and the slanting zone of cloud even enhanced the scene.

Winged Velocipede
Cover for my pamphlet about "how to ride overseas with your bicycle". The pamphlet explains how to take the pedals off and how to mend flat tires—that sort of thing—and forgets to mention how to attach wings.

Hertzsprung-Russell aurora
Imagining all the stars in the galaxy rushing to place themselves in your sky according to their luminosities and colors—the famous Hertzsprung-Russell graph, which tells scientists so much about the nature and evolution of stars. Our sun is the yellowish star half way down the "main sequence", looking bright because all the giants are so far away. Cover picture for Astronomical Calendar 2007, produced, I have to admit, not with paintbrush but with Fortran and Photoshop.

Watching an eclipse from Arizona
At Rough Rock in the Navajo reservation, Michele Pfeiffer (Navajo) and Mary Lynn Blackburn (Anglo) using a telescope (with proper filter across its aperture), a pinhole in black paper, and a globe-and-clothesline model to observe the eclipse of March 7, 1970, whose track of totality passed fifteen hundred miles away from them across the southeastern U.S. (Cover picture for Astronomical Calendar 1984.)

Sothis brings the flood
An Egyptian cat of 2500 B.C. watches the rising waters of the Nile, the vital annual event which at that time was announced by the heliacal rising (first visible rising before the sun) of Sirius, or Sothis, the Dog Star. (Cover picture for Astronomical Calendar 1978.)

Atlas
Atlas, war leader of the Titans who fought against the gods, was condemned to bear the sky on his shoulders for ever. He crouches astride the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar); he eventually turned to stone as the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Far in the Atlantic Ocean behind him is a continent: not America but Atlantis. I imagine him carrying a celestial globe (like the Roman sculpture called the Farnese Atlas) in which the stars are pricked, and the earth is mirrored (as in Mercator's picture of him carrying a terrestrial globe, from which derives our word atlas). (Cover for Astronomical Calendar 1996.)

Cook and the transit of Mercury
I found myself at Mercury Bay in the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand's North Island and learned that it was from here that Captain James Cook had observed the transit of Mercury in November 1769. So I realized I must do this picture for the Astronomical Calendar for 2004, when there would be one of the rarer transits of Venus. Cook had actually been sent on his Pacific voyage to observe the same year's Venus transit—then considered of great scientific importance—and he did that in June from Tahiti.

Navajo constellations
Ever since living in the Navajo reservation I had wanted to prepare a more intelligible version of the map given in a little 1947 book called Starlore Among the Navaho, by Father Berard Haile. I finally did so for the cover of Astronomical Calendar 2006, and tried to add the stylized figures and seven colors of Navajo sandpainting.

Europa and the Bull
Europa, princess of Phoenicia, was carried off across the sea by Zeus in the form of a bull, to Crete, where she became the mother of the Minoan civilization. Above Taurus the bull, the Hyades appear as a disorderly swirl of gulls and the Pleiades as a tight flock of doves.

This was Europa before her robe of Tyrian purple was painted on her.

Orion rising
Cover for the first Astronomical Calendar (for 1974). Back then, it was made by drawing black-on-white and having the printer "reverse" it.

Pisa
with Galileo showing his telescope. Cover painting for Astronomical Calendar2009. It was in 1609 that Galileo, having heard that such a device had been invented in Holland the year before, started making his own telescopes, which were good enough, when he turned them on the night sky, to make amazing discoveries — the mountainous surface of the moon, thousands of previously unseen stars, the explanation of the Milky Way as a multitude of stars, and then (in 1610) the satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. These discoveries, along with Kepler's explanation also in 1609 of the motion of the planets, launched the modern age of astronomy, which is why we are celebrating them in International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Galileo was a professor in Padua and later in Florence, but I imagined him revisiting his birthplace, Pisa. It was there that (according to story) he dropped bodies of different weights from the Leaning Tower to show that they fall at the same speed, and noticed that a lamp hanging in the cathedral swung to the same period whether swinging a long way or a short — the law of pendulums, which he foresaw could be used in clocks.

Pisa's famous or notorious Leaning Tower is the bell-tower or campanile for the Duomo or cathedral. The most photographed view of the two buildings is from a gateway over to the left, but I liked this closer viewpoint because the semicircular platform around the cathedral's apsidal east end adds a sweeping elliptical shape to the verticals (or near-verticals) of cathedral and tower. And in the southeastern sky to the left of the tower I could position the first-quarter moon (enlarging it surrealistically to suggest the view in the telescope). A minor challenge was that the tower is actually vertical as seen from here, because it leans south, so I gave it a twist to the west. A slightly greater challenge was that the weather was thin-cloudy, the contrast of sun and shadow not strong; I had to sharpen it. And the greatest challenge was that, if it was to be daytime, and the moon in that part of the sky, it would have to be afternoon, with the sun away to the right, hence the whole foreground in the cathedral's shadow. I thought that could be interesting, a purplish foreground, with figures silhouetted against the stream of golden sunlight going past in the middle distance, their faces without the benefit of the contrast of light and shadow, but I thought I could do it. Making details distinct when they're dark on dark is difficult, and I only partly succeeded. It looks better on the book than it does here.

The cathedral precinct (called the Piazza dei Miracoli) teems with people, though in costumes sadly less paintable than they would have been wearing in the seventeenth century. The disdainful cardinal and friar, representing the churchmen who put Galileo on trial for upsetting two thousand years of dogma, are unkind versions of Italian gentlemen I sketched as they walked by right here — the "cardinal" with uplifted eyes could have been composing a poem, and the "friar" had not a tonsured head but a mop of curly hair. The sea captain, interested in Galileo's telescope because it could reveal ships two hours' sail away, will be recognized by readers of the Tintin books as Sir Francis Haddock in "The Secret of The Unicorn".