From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon

A Baltimore gun club with nothing to shoot at after the war builds a nine-hundred-foot cannon in Florida and fires three men at the moon; the sequel follows them round it. Verne worked out the launch site, the escape velocity and the splashdown in the Pacific with real arithmetic, and got remarkably close to what happened a century later. Both books are here. Sixteen plates of moonlit landscapes and night skies by painters including Adolph von Menzel and Henry Pether give the story the lunar atmosphere its arithmetic leaves out.