All text quoted from Ron Miller’s excellent Gizmodo page on Lucien Rudaux. Check out Ron’s work here
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.
Originally a commercial illustrator, Rudaux was also a passionate amateur astronomer. In 1892, at the age of 18, he joined the French astronomical society. He was among the first ever to observe a solar flare in white light and published numerous reports of this and his many other observations in the society’s bulletin between 1892 and 1914.
Rudaux built his own private observatory near the coast of Normandy. Using its 4-inch reflector, he created pioneering photographs of the moon and planets as well as a photographic atlas of the Milky Way. Meanwhile, he produced countless books and magazine articles, usually accompanied by his skilful illustrations. These were translated and reprinted all over the globe. Some of his articles bore sensational titles such as “When the Moon Breaks Up”, with appropriately apocalyptic artwork. His masterwork, however, was a 1937 coffee-table volume called “Sur les Autres Mondes” (On Other Worlds). It featured more than 400 illustrations, including 20 full-page color paintings. Never before had readers seen such an accurate and spectacular depiction of the worlds of the solar system. So accurate were his paintings that many of them look as though they were done last year instead of more than 70 years ago.
http://www.fabiofeminofantascience.org/PAUL/PAUL2.html
