Sur les autres mondes

A sweeping illustrated treatise of popular astronomy published by Larousse in 1937 as fourteen weekly large-quarto fascicules, totalling 224 pages, 313 engravings, 73 black-and-white plates and 20 full-page colour plates. Lucien Rudaux (1874-1947), director of the Donville Observatory and a celebrated astronomical painter, describes the entire solar system (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, minor planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (discovered just seven years earlier)) together with the Sun and the stars, after two opening chapters on the history of astronomy and on modern observational methods. The closing chapter briefly addresses interplanetary travel and the question of life on other worlds, framed throughout as a controlled extrapolation from observed data.