I recently picked up some semi-vintage Scientific/Natural History Books that belonged to my late uncle, loads of superb stuff that I’ll be posting over the course of the rest of the year…

Onto the first scan then – this amazing image is taken from the 1970 edition of the Time-Life International book “The Universe” and is by an artist I’d not come across before, Italian American Antonio Petruccelli (1907-1994) born in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Alas I’ve had to crop this as the painting covers the spread, it really has to be seen to be believed the colours are something else, and I’ve done my best to keep them intact here….

A snippet from the Illustrations accompanying text: “A Close look at the Solar Furnace”

The Sun’s vast sphere, 864,000 miles in diameter contains 335 billion cubic miles of violently hot gasses that weigh more than 2,000 quadrillion tons. Direct study can probe no deeper than the sun’s double atmosphere (the tenuous outer corona and the shallow, inner chromosphere) and it’s surface skin (the photosphere), because only the energy from these two zones reaches the earth after a 93-million mile journey  in the form of visible light or invisible radiation. Yet the density, temperature and composistion of gasses in the suns’s hidden interior have been calculated, and astrophysicists know the nuclear processes that make them burn…

Antonio Petruccelli was an extremely versatile Illustrator, a very capable space artist just one of his attributes – read a bit more about him at buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com