I’ve finished up restoring scans of the old Colliers space article series for publication in AIAA-Houston “Horizons.” Some of the art was easy to fix up, some not so easy… art that was printed across two pages turned out to be especially annoying since there were inevitably differences in coloration from one page to the next. On the whole, though, I think it came out pretty well. Given that “Horizons” is free for the downloading, I recommend getting them.
Most of the art showing the Earth as seen from space is, well, wrong. This is not to say that the artists didn’t know what they were doing; but in 1952-54, it was just that nobody had actually seen Earth from space. And thus a lot of things are just wrong, most glaringly the lack of weather.
One Chesley Bonestell painting that I just cleaned up a bit depicts a “baby space station” (a smallish bioastronautics satellite) burning up over San Francisco at night, with the moon just setting over the Pacific:
While a nice painting, anyone who has ever seen a photo of the night side of Earth will recognize that it’s not quite right. During the course of cleaning up the image, I tinkered with levels; one setting turned out to both completely mangle the painting… and also make it more realistic:
So, you know… yeah. There’s that.