Later we looked at Saturn, which was transfixing. Rings wide open, it looked just like the Stephen Larson photograph, which was, for years, the best photo of Saturn ever made. 'Chick' Capen later would let me show up at the 'wedding cake' dome and look at Mars through the big refractor at Lowell, carried up to the big brass eyepiece by the same rickety hand-cranked wooden hoist that Lowell himself used. Mars through the refractor looked a light apricot color with blue-green darker regions. The seeing was awful every time I looked at it there, Mars looking like a print seen through flowing water. Capen once showed me a flat file drawer filled with printed maps of Mars going back a century and more.

Thus prepared, I created the globe-shaped oil painting, at 18 inches diameter equivalent to a detailed flat painting 56 inches wide. The Survey made available to me the best versions of prints from the Mariner 6 and 7 missions. I added latitude and longitude grids to them based on references. Once I had whitened the chalkboard surface of the blank globe with gesso and sanded it to a smooth surface, I placed 'tic marks' every 10 degrees with a 'Rapidograph' technical drawing pen, commonly used in pre-digital map preparation and another tool I first encountered at the Survey.

To paint the surface, I used oil, in contrast to the airbrushes in use around me. I applied ivory black and titanium white oil paint with dry-brush, glaze, and fine-brush work methods. I added sharp-shaded topographic detail with the Rapidograph pen. I wanted to pay particular attention to making a space-age update of all those beautiful maps that came before, combining their heritage with the first close-up views of what they were incompletely seeing. Near the north pole there was still only Earth-based information to work from. It was incredible fun, and all the time planetary geologists were passing by to share this or that exciting discovery.

I prepared, and still have, oil and pencil studies where I used every Mariner far-encounter Mars photo to make as detailed a map of the 'classical' markings as possible. Something had to appear in at least two images before I included it. In numerous places, you can see hints of what was revealed later, outlined by the albedo markings.

They used my globe as a reference for the first planet-wide mapping mosaics gathered by Mariner 9. This surviving print from that process shows the planet's visibility and its dark markings just 'recovering' from the all enshrouding dust storm, revealed in rows of new photos at left.