Jules Verne's Lunar Projectile Passes the Moon — From the Earth to the Moon, 1865

Drawn directly from Jules Verne's landmark 1865 novel 'From the Earth to the Moon' and its sequel 'Around the Moon,' this masterful wood engraving captures the Columbiad shell-projectile dwarfed against a crescent-lit Moon in the star-scattered void. The bullet-shaped capsule carrying Barbicane, Nicholl, and Ardan skims past the terminator line of a cratered, dramatically shaded lunar surface — humanity's first fictional spacecraft rendered with breathtaking astronomical realism for a Victorian readership hungry for scientific romance.