Max Goes to Mars was illustrated by Alan Okamoto. Alan worked from real models for the main characters (Tori, Commander Grant, and Max) who posed for the scenes; he then added the backgrounds as needed for the different Earth and space scenes. Additional characters were sometimes based on real people and sometimes not. Below is a list of some special things to look for in the paintings. We have also included a few other special notes of interest.
- Cover: We see Max as we see him later on p. 18, looking apprehensively at the Spirit rover, which landed on Mars in 2004.
- p. 3: The scene is set in front of the 18-inch telescope at the Sommers-Bausch Observatory on the campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Notice that Commander Grant is holding a globe of Mars; the boy resting in Commander Grant’s arms is actually the author’s son, Grant — for whom Commander Grant is named. As noted in the credits on p. 2, the model for Commander Grant is Lado Jurkin, one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan". For grownups who wish to learn more about the Lost Boys, we highly recommend Dave Eggers’ book What is the What. Among the other children in the painting are the author’s daughter, Brooke, hugging Max; and the observatory director’s daughter, Sophie Duncan, wearing glasses. (The children are of course pictured as they were at the time the first edition was published.)
- p. 4-5: Notice the gullies on the mountainside, which echo gullies shown on Mars on p. 19. The gullies on Mars, discovered in photographs taken from orbiting spacecraft, are an important topic of study. With regard to how we can tell the difference between planets and stars, as discussed in the Big Kid box: You may also hear that planets don’t twinkle like stars. This is generally true, though you may notice some twinkling of planets, particularly when they are low on the horizon. Twinkling is actually caused by light being bent rapidly in different directions by motions of air (“turbulence”) in our atmosphere. The reason for the difference in twinkling between planets and stars is that stars are so far away that they appear as single points of light; this means that a star essentially sends only a single ray of light into our atmosphere, so as air motions change how the light ray is bent, we see the twinkling. Planets are close enough that they actually appear as tiny disks in the sky, which essentially means that they send a tightly packed “bunch” of rays into the atmosphere. These rays are also affected by air motions, but because they come in a bunch — with each ray being bent slightly differently — the effects tend to cancel each other out so that the twinkling is less obvious. This article provides additional detail.
- p. 6: Be sure to see the video of Max doing his famous merry-go-round trick.
- p. 7: The illustration here is based on the Voyage scale model solar system on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This project was originally started by the author of the Max series. Voyage models are now being built in many other communities around the world. Learn more at this link on the author’s personal web site.
- p. 8: Is Max really listening closely to Tori? No… you can see he’s actually looking at the squirrel in the tree above her head.
- p. 9: In the dream bubbles, we see Tori imagining a scene from H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds, while Max imagines playing frisbee tug-o-war with a fire-breathing squirrel.
- p. 10: The scene shown here is based on the Mars exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Visitors to the exhibit are always outside the glass, like the man and boy shown in the painting. They are supposed to be imagining that they are inside a Mars colony, looking out the window to the Martian surface. For that reason, the museum normally only allows museum staff to appear behind the glass in the "outside" part of Mars, and the staff always wear space suits out there since that would be required on the real Mars. But for the purposes of this painting, the museum allowed Tori and Max to go behind the glass anyway; they did not have any spacesuits that fit Max, so we decided to show them without the suits; it’s safe, after all, since this is only a pretend Mars, not the real Mars that they visit later in the book.
- p. 11: The image shown on the large flat screen TV is based on this real photo from the Spirit rover. Also notice the signs for "no dogs," "no food," and "no drink" under the screen — with all three rules obviously violated as Max licks up spilled food and drink!
- p. 12: Be sure to notice that this scene takes place on the Moon, where the rocket to Mars will launch from. Once you have a Moon colony, it make sense to launch rockets to Mars from there, rather than from Earth, since the Moon’s weaker gravity makes it much more fuel-efficient to sent rockets outward.
- p. 13: It looks like Commander Grant is getting an upside-down lick from Max, but of course they are both weightless, and there is no up or down in space when you are weightless. You may also notice that the mission patch on Commander Grant’s flight suit is the same one used on the frisbee in Max Goes to the Moon.
- p. 14: The TV screen shows Tori’s reflection as she looks at the tiny Earth and Moon, which you can see just above her reflected image. The inset in the lower left of the screen shows the view aboard the Mars ship, where you can see Commander Grant holding his video camera to look out the window and capture the image that Tori is seeing.
- p. 15: As the ship swings around Mars, you can see the small moon Phobos above the ship and, farther off in the distance, the even smaller Deimos.
- p. 16-17: This painting actually shows a time sequence, an idea invoked by the change from daylight at the left to darkness at the right. At the far left you can see the parachute from the landing. The left page also shows Max and Commander Grant at the door of the rover, while at the right we see Max playing ball with an astronaut outside one of the greenhouses.
- p. 18: We see Max at the Spirit rover. Both Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, arrived on Mars in January, 2004, and were expected to work for only about 3 months. But Spirit kept going until 2010 and Opportunity until 2018. You might think of them as the "energizer bunnies" of Mars!
- p. 19: As noted for p. 4-5, here we see gullies on the crater wall in the background.
- p. 20-21: You can see the tiny blue Earth shining in the Martian dawn above the text on the right-hand page (just above the word “for”). The reason for “dawn” is that, because Earth is closer to the Sun than Mars, you would only have opportunities to see Earth either in the dawn or evening skies. This is analogous to the way we see Mercury and Venus in our skies only in the mornings or evenings.
- p. 22: In this scene the crew is still at low altitude along the base of Olympus Mons, in a little canyon along the great mountain’s perimeter.
- p. 23: Amazingly, artist Alan Okamoto painted this painting just a few weeks before the Spirit rover recorded the first actual video of a dust devil on the surface of Mars. But we already knew that dust devils — some quite large — are common because photos from orbit showed their tracks in the Martian sand.
- p. 26-27: The four vignettes here show a time sequence. In the first, we see the lander heading back up to the mother ship in orbit of Mars; on Mars itself, notice that you can see Olympus Mons. The second vignette shows the rocket en route back to home. The third shows the lander coming down on the Moon, where the crew goes first. The last shows a shuttle taking the crew home to Earth.
- p. 28-29: The scene here is based on a view from a deck in Boulder, Colorado.