what to see on
themis

For a scenic browse, and an answer-page for Guess The World:

centaur on themis

The airlock wheezed asthmatically, and we stepped out upon the soil of the satellite Themis.

A huge mob of natives had gathered around to greet us. They were a weird looking outfit. Sort of like men on horses, you might say, or like those old Centaurs you read about in mythology books. Maybe that's where the legend of Centaurs originated; I don't know. The more man travels the spaceways, the more he discovers races of beings similar to the freaks and curiosities recorded in ancient myths. Lanse Biggs believes that once upon a time, thousands of years ago, before Earth's old moon crashed, destroying the civilization then existent, Man knew the secret of spacetravel, and legend is a record of things once seen and known. But I wouldn't know about that. I'm just a radioman....

Anyhow, these Themisites were sort of like us down to the tummy. But from there on they branched out into the equine family, being endowed with strong, muscular, quadrupedal bodies and postscripted with long, bushy tails.

But they were intelligent. No doubt about that. And surprisingly enough, they seemed friendly! One, their ruler, trotted forward and raised an arm in the cosmoswide gesture of greeting. He addressed us in Universale, the common language of space....

Nelson S Bond, The Ordeal of Lancelot Biggs (Amazing Stories, May 1943)

>> Guess The World - Fifth Series

Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
The story is set on the hypothetical tenth moon of Saturn called Themis, discovered by Pickering in 1905 and never confirmed later. The author exaggerates its dimensions ("about 300 miles in diameter", while Pickering himself estimated it at 38 miles) and doesn't gives many more details. It obviously belongs to that category of "lost worlds" of the OSS like Vulcan and the unnamed moon of Venus.

Comment from Zendexor:
Before Lone Wolf's email I hadn't known of the hypothetical moon of Venus; so I looked it up and found it was first claimed to have been seen by Giovanni Cassini in 1672. Well, well! Shades of Brackett's The Moon That Vanished! And if you search on Wikipedia for "hypothetical moon of Mercury" you'll find some interesting stuff including an April Fool joke by NASA in 2012. It all makes me think it would be good to do a page on "Hypothetical Worlds" if only I had the time, and at any rate I ought to put an appropriate reference in the Themes page.