NEW YORK, NY.- Skybreakers: Between Heaven and Earth at Christie's brings together more than 100 lots comprised of a curated group of more than 30 lots of space-themed artworks by visionaries such as Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman from the Paul G. Allen Collection, combined with more than 70 lots of rare lunar and Martian meteorites, and extraordinary mineral specimens from other collections. In total, Skybreakers celebrates artifacts of both the terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms, and honors humanity's enduring curiosity about the world and the cosmos—an exploration that bridges science, imagination, and the sublime.

The space art pieces in this auction, along with their publication in popular magazines, inspired a generation of explorers, scientists, and aerospace engineers. Highlights include space art from the collection of Paul G. Allen, which was well known for its holdings of Chesley Bonestell, among other famous artists of the genre. Bonestells in the sale include: works created for Collier magazine's Man Will Conquer Space Soon! series, such as Bonestell's Re-entry of the Baby Space Station, depicting a red-hot rocket over the San Francisco Bay (estimate: $30,000-50,000); an evocative image of a space ship before take-off, Zero Hour Minus Five, Published in Willy Ley's Conquest of Space, 1949 (estimate: $12,000-18,000); and a highly important portfolio of Chesley Bonestell's earliest astronomical drawings, the precursors of his revelatory solar system series sold to Life magazine in 1944 (estimate: $50,000-80,000).

The other aspect of the sale is the lots of meteors and minerals. The weight of every known meteorite is less than the world's annual output of gold, and this sale offers examples from this extremely rare category. The meteors in the sale include a Seymchan meteorite found near a streambed in the Magadan district of Siberia. Made from the boundary of the mantle and core of a differentiated asteroid, (i.e., an asteroid with a crust, mantle and metallic core) and rendered into a sphere, this piece reveals aspects of structure impossible to observe in a flat two-dimensional slab. Natural phenomena like mineral specimens are objects of both scientific and aesthetic interest, which places them comfortably and often dramatically within any interior setting. Leading the mineral offerings is an enormous, museum-sized opal specimen of great quality and beauty from the famed collection of the former CEO of Apple, Mike Scott (estimate: $400,000-600,000).