Accession No

6067

Brief Description

set of 50 Wills’s cigarette cards, ‘Romance of the Heavens’, 1928

Origin

England

Maker

W.D. & H.O. Wills, Imperial Tobacco Co

Class

astronomy

Earliest Date

1928

Latest Date

1928

Inscription Date

Material

card

Dimensions

card dimensions: 36mm x 68mm

Special Collection

Provenance

Purchased from Colin Narbeth & Son Ltd., Cecil Court, Leicester Square, London, WC2N 4HE, on or before 07/06/2006.

Inscription

“Wills’s Cigarettes, Romance of the Heavens, W. D. & H. O. Wills. Issued by the Imperial Tobacco Co (of Great Britain & Ireland), Ltd” (on reverse of each card)

Description Notes

set of 50 Wills’s cigarette cards, ‘Romance of the Heavens’, 1928

Each card has a colour image of an astronomical phenomenon on the obverse and a brief explanation of that phenomenon on the reverse. The titles of each card are:

1 Halley’s Comet
2 One theory of the Formation of the Moon
3 Neap Tides
4 Spring Tides
5 A Shower of Meteors
6 A Lunar Corona
7 Typical Lunar Craters
8 Lunar Craters
9 The Earth as seen from the Moon
10 Earth-Shine
11 Mock Moon
12 Phases of the Moon
13 Portion of Moon’s Surface
14 The Dumb-bell Nebula
15 A Spiral Nebula
16 The Inner Planets
17 The Outer Planets
18 Jupiter
19 Two Views of Mars
20 An Imaginary Landscape of Mars
21 The Surface of Mercury--an imaginary view
22 Saturn
23 Saturn’s Rings
24 Two Views of Saturn
25 The Phases of Venus
26 The Dark Side of Venus--an imaginary view
27 The Sunlit Side of Venus--an imaginary view
28 Cassiopeia and the Pole Star
29 The Composition of a Star
30 The Evolution of a Star
31 Two Giant Stars
32 Leo
33 The Milky Way
34 Orion
35 The Pleiades
36 The Pole Star and the Plough
37 The Southern Cross
38 Variable Stars
39 The Aurora Australis
40 The Aurora Borealis
41 The Cause of the Auroras
42 Solar Corona
43 Electrical Discharges from the Sun
44 An Eclipse
45 An Eclipse of the Sun viewed from the Moon
46 The Midnight Sun
47 Shadows and “Rainbows”
48 Solar Prominences
49 Typical Sun-spot
50 The Zodiacal Light

Condition: good; complete

References

Events