Conférence faite au Palais de la Découverte le 10 avril 1943
Popular astronomy lecture delivered at the Palais de la Découverte on 10 April 1943 by Lucien Rudaux, director of the Donville observatory, and published in 1946 by the Université de Paris. Rudaux first sets out the astronomer's three means of investigation (telescope, spectroscope, thermocouple), then tours the Moon and the planets, asking at every stage what a human carried there by the infant science of astronautics would see and feel. The Moon takes up a third of the text, with the landscape reconstructions the author computed himself, rejecting the jagged relief of tradition in favour of craters with softened ramparts. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the outer giants follow, each judged on its habitability. Eight figures, several of them Rudaux's own paintings.