Butler's Moonscapes and Planets

“Of course it could not be done from nature. So the best way I could think of was to rig up my subject in miniature in my studio—a miniature planet, miniature satellites, and an artificial sun. Now to do this involved difficulties. No one knows anything about the surface of the satellites, but the astronomers and other scientists whom I consulted guessed that they were approximately spherical, with rough rocky surfaces, variegated in color, probably rather dark and cracked in every direction. Since such a subject could be modeled in clay I thus made miniatures about 18 inches square of a small section of each of the satellites, and allowed them to dry and crack, after which they were stained. An aluminum globe, a foot in diameter, was given a coat of the reddish-yellow tone characteristic of large areas of Mars, supposed to be deserts. I made the markings of longitude and latitude and the so-called canals. Then using rubber balls at proportionate distances to represent Phobos and Deimos, the two satellites and set to work.​

I often wished that I could stand on Deimos and see how the war god really looks. But I fear that the shock would be hard to bear. Besides, I would only weigh an ounce, and survive less than two seconds.”