The first science artist to draw accurate pictures of Mars and the Moon
Although largely unknown today, astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux was the grandfather of all modern space art. During the height of his career in the 1920s and 30s, he produced spacescapes of such accuracy that they still hold up well even today.
Image 1: Rudaux visualized Venus as an eroded, rocky dust bowl and Mars as a dust-storm-swept wasteland of rock-strewn plains. He produced astonishing portraits of Saturn’s rings (pictured) and Jupiter as seen from its satellites.
Image 2: A solar eclipse seen from the Moon.
Image 3: He even ranged beyond our solar system, imagining what the worlds circling other stars might be like. Here is an incredible painting of multicolored shadows on the planet of a binary star.
Image 4: Especially striking are Rudaux’s depictions of the surface of the moon. Where every other artist had shown a landscape dominated by towering, jagged peaks Rudaux showed rounded mountains and a rolling terrain—-exactly like that photographed by Apollo astronauts.
(via stellarexplosion)
