Today would have marked Chesley Bonestell’s 125th birthday. Throughout the 1930s Bonestell worked as an architect and then a movie matte painter on high profile projects ranging from New York’s Chrysler building, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and George Pal’s War of the Worlds, but it is astronomical art where Bonestell is best known and revered. His first astronomical paintings were published in the 1940s—a series of astoundingly realistic images of Saturn as seen from its moons for Life magazine. In the 1950s, Wernher Von Braun asked Bonestell to conceptualize near future space flight, and Viking Books collected a series of his paintings about lunar expeditions called The Conquest of the Moon. These images helped inspire a nation to strive toward the stars.
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