On November 17 I wrote about "Great Comet" from the five-card set "Five Celestial Views" sold at the Tō Nichi Planetarium in Yurakuchō, Tokyo—the first planetarium in the city, in the Tō Nichi Kaikan of the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun (predecessor of The Mainichi), opened in November 1938 (Showa 13). This time: "Solar Eclipse Seen from the Moon."
The postcard is from amateur astronomer Seiji Ogawa's collection. After the title it says "The black circle is Earth," with the note: "Many craters visible on the lunar surface exceed five or six hundred miles in diameter. (Earth's largest craters barely exceed six or seven miles.)"
Humans first landed on the Moon with Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969 (Showa 44)—more than thirty years after this postcard—so it is clearly an imagined lunar view. A bleak vast wilderness with great fissures and craters, a jet-black sky with Earth and small stars, stirs interest in space.
A solar eclipse seen from the Moon is a lunar eclipse from Earth—in other words, on the Moon Earth hides the Sun; from Earth Earth's shadow falls on the Moon. In this picture the Sun hidden by Earth looks like an annular eclipse with a diamond ring; but at maximum eclipse on the Moon the Sun probably would not look like this, because Earth is much larger than the Moon. At maximum, unlike an annular eclipse from Earth, Earth would fully cover the Sun—a total eclipse and total darkness.
Still, a romantic world of space imagined in art. JAXA plans crewed lunar landing around 2020 and a lunar base around 2030. Lunar eclipses on Earth occur four times in 2020 (Jan. 11, Jun. 6, Jul. 5, Nov. 30) and often thereafter; then we may know by real photos—not imagination—what a solar eclipse from the Moon and a Sun hidden by Earth look like. Before and after totality the Sun still shines directly on the Moon, so the surface must be extremely hot.