Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Putting the Universe on Canvas With Astronomical Artist Don Dixon

Episode Date: July 24, 2006

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Space artist Don Dixon putting the universe on canvas, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. He has turned the unseen into stunningly beautiful images for more than 30 years, and he's not about to slow down. We'll visit with Don Dixon at his home in Southern California

to talk about half a lifetime in astronomical art and animation. You might want to prepare for the conversation by exploring his website, www.cosmographica.com. After all, this is only a radio show. We'll give you that address again in a couple of minutes.

Also in store, another stellar update from Bruce Fetz in this week's What's Up Report, and a splashy new space trivia contest. And Emily will be along in no time with Q&A. Now you get a touchdown.. Nose gear touchdown. Nose gear touchdown. And we'll stop you. Roger, we'll stop. Welcome back to Discovery, and congratulations on a great mission,

expanding our knowledge and experience with orbiter repair and bringing the space station back to a full crew complement. our knowledge and experience with orbiter repair and bringing the space station back to a full crew complement. We put last week's show to bed just before the July 17 landing of Space Shuttle Discovery. It's old news now, but the winged spacecraft made a perfect touchdown on the long Kennedy Space Center runway. The new guy on the International Space Station, German astronaut Thomas Reiter, watched the landing with his roomies, Pavel Vinogradov and Jeffrey Williams. This is the first time in about six years that the ISS has been home to three people, with more to come.

More details and some very cool photos are at planetary.org. Shuttle Atlantis is up next, with NASA hoping for a launch in just a couple of months. If you do visit planetary.org, you'll also see an update on New Horizons, which is speeding along toward Pluto at 70,000 kilometers, or more than 43,000 miles per hour. Principal investigator Alan Stern says all is well with a Jupiter encounter now just seven months away. Emily Lakdawalla is standing by with an especially colorful Q&A encounter. I'll be right back with Don Dixon. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, do rainbows look the same on other planets in our solar system? Earth's rainbows are caused by the interaction of light with spherical raindrops.

The light is refracted as it enters the surface of the raindrop, reflected off the back of the drop, and again refracted as it leaves the drop. As a result, the incoming light is reflected back over a wide range of angles, with the most intense light at an angle of about 40 degrees to the original angle of the incoming light. But this angle depends in part on the wavelength of the incoming light. Blue light is refracted at a greater angle than red light. This dispersion produces the color separations we see in a rainbow. So in order to have a rainbow, you need to have a sky that contains white light from the sun

and droplets in the atmosphere that can refract and reflect white light. Water is just one such substance. Ammonia and methane are two others. So where else might there be rainbows in the solar system? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Find out. I told you we'd provide Don Dixon's website once more before we let you hear our conversation with him. It's www.cosmographica.com.

Of course, you can also get there from the link we've posted at planetary.org. When you do, don't be surprised if his fantastic landscapes and vistas look familiar. His art has graced hundreds of publications in the last three decades. His first work of astronomical art, A Meteor, was turned out in crayon when he was just four years old. Painting was just a hobby he carried through his study of physics at UC Berkeley when he decided to find out if he could sell his work. He could, he did, and he still does today, often at his home just a mile or two from the beach in Southern California. Don Dixon, thanks first of all for joining us on Planetary Radio and for welcoming us into your home here in my hometown of Long Beach. Here you were,

home here in my hometown of Long Beach. Here you were, one of my science fiction and science art and space art heroes, and little did I know that we were citizens of the same town. Well, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be on your show, which I've enjoyed. Thank you very much. You've been at this for quite a while. When did you get into this end of art, which you do so very well? Well, thank you. Actually, probably since the early 1970s, around 1974, I started doing it full time. Initially, I was doing traditional animation, mostly industrial films, but I'd always been interested in astronomy. And during the 70s, did a number of animation sequences for NASA, and that's really what got me into it. Were you inspired?

Let me put it this way. Who inspired you? You probably had heroes, guys who came before. Of course. Everybody in the genre owes a huge debt to Chesley Bonestell. Chesley Bonestell, of course. The architect-turned architect turned illustrator who was painting these things back when everybody knew it was crazy and doing it very beautifully

and as accurately as anybody could at the time. He laid the foundation for the entire genre. He was, like you, an extremely skilled artist, but he also seemed to set the tone in that he did strive for such accuracy. I mean, he really paid attention to whatever the latest findings were about the solar system and beyond and tried to capture those. He did indeed, and it's amazing

how well conceptually many of his paintings still hold up. Obviously, we've learned so much more. We've learned, for instance, that Mars' sky is not cerulean stratosphere blue, but this strange salmon pink. But if you look at his paintings of the Martian landscape, they weren't far off. He knew, obviously, it was a desert, and he incorporated all the traditional desert motifs, which it turned out we would, in fact, find on Mars.

Anybody else that you would point to? And not necessarily within the realm of astronomical art. Bonestell had a predecessor named Lucien Rodot, who was actually an astronomer around the turn of the century in France, who in some ways was even more accurate than Bonestell. For instance, Bonestell's lunar scapes incorporated very jagged, dramatic peaks, going on the assumption that there was no erosion on the moon. But Rudeau, being an astronomer, looked at the moon through a telescope,

which Bonestell did, of course. But he sketched what he saw. And the lunar mountains in profile turned out to be very shallow and rolling and gentle, and that's how he drew the moon. His stuff was also quite inspirational to many of us. Have you been surprised at all to find that there are a good number of planetary scientists, astronomers, who are also artists of varying levels of skill, some of them quite good? Oh, yes. One of the best is Dr. William K. Hartman. Yep, he's been on the show a couple of times.

He's a true renaissance man, scientist, a very good one. He's one of the people who came up with the theory about how the moon formed through a massive collision way back when. But he's also a very, very good artist and a novelist to boot. He's got two novels under his belt. But it's not their day job, guys like Bill Hartman. It is for you. But it's not their day job, guys like Bill Hartman. It is for you.

And for so many artists, really making a living at this is a struggle. Is your specialty, has it been more rewarding, a little bit easier to get by? I mean, that would have to be based on the fact that you do have pretty good skills in addition to this niche that you've chosen. One of the advantages of starting out when I did is that if you could paint realistically using, back then, traditional tools, acrylic, airbrush, you could make a pretty good living at it. It was a novelty act. Back in the 70s and 80s, a fair amount of knowledge, decent skills.

You could create an image that was pretty fantastic that people would buy. To some degree, people have gotten used to it. The movie special effects business has certainly raised the standard for realism and creating exotic and fantastic environments. People expect a lot more. And, in fact, those of us who have survived through the decades have learned to embrace the new tools that technology has given us. Many of us will use a program such as Terragen or Cinema 4D

to generate a fractal, randomized, naturalistic computer landscape and then use that as a ground to build on so we can still maintain that sense of hyper-realism that I think is what really attracts most people to astronomical art. It's pretty. You can do a loose watercolor of a landscape and people will look at it and say, yes, that's pretty, but they don't feel they're necessarily there. But if you can create something that fools the eye and the mind to let people put themselves into the picture, it has an appeal

that is still very much in demand, I think. I think that's one of the things that certainly draws me into your work, the work of greats like Bonestell. The fact that I feel like I'm standing there. I'm on that alien world looking at that impossible sky, or not so impossible sky, just one that no human has ever had that view of. There's certainly that. That was the appeal for me when I discovered Bonestell's art. One of the interesting things I've discovered, and many of us have experienced

this, is that as soon as you put a human element into one of these extraterrestrial landscapes, it seems to lose a certain amount of appeal. It brings it back to Earth in a sense, I guess. People really do want to have that sense of being the first to step into this unexplored vista. I never thought about that. Yeah, it's odd. More from astronomical artist Don Dixon when Planetary Radio returns in a minute. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're building the first ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report.

It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're ready to continue our visit with renowned astronomical artist Don Dixon.

The tools of his art, just like the tools of science and space exploration, have evolved enormously over the decades, and they've shaped how Don gets his work done and how long it takes him to do it, whether it's a magazine cover, an animation, or a canvas for a collector's wall. You mentioned how the tools have changed, beginning with airbrush and acrylic and so on. I was actually surprised, I shouldn't have been to learn, as you were showing me some works in the living room a moment ago, that you are using these tools that are right here in the 21st century.

And that's, I guess, pretty common. You do most of your work with those? Most of us who actually make a living doing scientific illustration have had to embrace digital tools just to survive. We're long past the day when you could take a couple of months to do a painting for a client. They want it next week now. And they want to be able to make modifications quickly. And if you are accomplished in Photoshop and other programs like that, you can, in fact, do that.

Virtually all of my commercial work these days is done digitally. And yet, you obviously, with some works, have more time. You showed me an incredible Marscape that you said you've been working on for a couple of years. Not consistently. It's something I pull out of the closet every few months when I've got some free time. There's definitely a market with collectors for something that can actually be hung on the wall. People still do want originals. And these days, and especially as my eyes are getting older, I'm not painting so small and tight. Back in my animation days, we were basically creating a piece of art

the size of a letter that would hold photographic detail. As I've gotten older, the canvases have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, but that's fine because that's really what the collectors want. They want something big. Are those the bulk of your clients? Are they individual collectors, or is it the science fiction publishers, or is it NASA, aerospace companies? Most of my clients are magazines.

My two biggest clients lately have been Scientific American magazine. I've done a dozen covers for them, and about every other month I'll do an illustration or a series of illustrations for one or two of their articles. And Astronomy magazine, I do covers for them every three or four months. Yeah, both great magazines. The business has changed over the years. You talked about the effect that people like George Lucas have had in film.

Great piece recently in the L.A. Times, talked with you, talked about some of your colleagues as well. Somebody in there was talking about how real images from instruments like the Hubble, Hubble Space Telescope, may have changed the business for some of you. I don't know. Is that true for you? It's true in the extent that we have more information to work with. The tone of that article was to some degree that bigger telescopes and planetary probes have replaced astronomical artists. That's a little bit like saying that CAT scans and electron microscopes have replaced medical illustrators.

You can gather the data, but you still need somebody to interpret it. And that really has been the forte of astronomic artists. We can gather information from a number of sources and try to figure out what it really looks like. That's something, in fact, that astronomers often don't do themselves. They work with computer models and numbers and tables of data. And very often during the course of illustrating an article for, say, Scientific American, which is written by research scientists, they will be delighted and astounded to actually find that somebody is thinking about what their discovery looks like.

And it forces them to actually think about what it would look like. I know that Bill Hartman, who you mentioned earlier, has said that his ability to create these images that he does as an artist have helped him enormously as a scientist. And it's almost as if you're coming at it from the other direction. Very much so. Bill Hartman once critiqued one of my paintings saying that the distribution of craters was completely wrong. And he was right. He was absolutely right. I had created a random distribution,

but he showed me a curve showing how many more big craters are than little ones. And if I wanted to actually look natural, I should keep that in mind while painting. So we feed back and forth from each other. A couple of minutes left. There's one other topic we have to get to, but I do want to remind people, as we did before our conversation, that really if they want to get full appreciation, they've got to go to your website and take a look at some of these works. I guess most of your works across your entire career. There are examples of them on the site.

I have very early things that if I had any pride, I'd be embarrassed to show people. But I figure it shows evolution not only of the way we've thought about these other planets, but also how one's skills and talents can develop during the course of a career. So I leave them up there as examples to young artists. And I also put my most recent things up there. Well, we have the link to your site at our site, planetary.org, where people can hear this. One last thing that I don't think you're completely free to speak about. To paraphrase Dave Bowman in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010, something wonderful is going to happen in the hills of Los Angeles,

something that many of us who are locals have been waiting for for years, and that is the impending reopening of the Griffith Observatory, which I guess is where you spend a lot of your days. Yes, that's my day job. I'm up there four days a week. I serve as the art director, overseeing publications, and primarily these days the development of our opening planetarium show, which will be, as you say, something wonderful, utilizing state-of-the-art technology to completely paint our dome with moving imagery,

basically OmniMax all around you, 360 degrees, 4,000 lines of resolution, a completely immersive environment. So I've been working with a team of a dozen or so animators for two years trying to finish this film in time. I think we'll be finished in time, and I think it will be quite wonderful. And so we're, what, months away from that maybe, not years anymore? We are slated to open in late autumn of 2006. Wonderful. Well, we've been planning for years to make a trek up there and hopefully we'll get to look around

and get a little preview before that big opening. And I have to say that's something that has inspired me ever since I was a little kid growing up in L.A. Just as work by artists like you and you have inspired me to want to take my talents, which have more to do with microphones, and attempt to do a little bit of what you do

and get people excited about these incredible vistas that we're opening up on the final frontier. That sounded so scripted. Don, thank you so much for allowing us into the home, and we sure look forward to seeing more of your work and that visit to that show at the Griffith Observatory. Well, thank you. Don Dixon is an astronomical artist. That's his term.

It is apt. Definitely take a look at the website, and we will do so ourselves, I'm sure, many times, particularly on the cover of Scientific American, probably my favorite magazine. We'll be checking in with Emily Lakdawalla next as she comes back to give us a little bit more of this week's Q&A, followed, of course, by Bruce Fetz with this week's edition of What's Up. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Where else in the solar system might we see rainbows? The necessary ingredients are a view of the sun and droplets of a substance that can refract and reflect white light, such as water, ammonia, or methane.

reflect white light, such as water, ammonia, or methane. Jupiter's atmosphere contains abundant ammonia, so there should be rainbows in Jupiter's sky if it's not too cloudy overhead. There is water rain at deeper levels than Jupiter, but higher elevation clouds would almost certainly block the sun. On colder worlds like Uranus, Neptune, and Titan, methane droplets could produce rainbows. However, methane is an efficient absorber of longer wavelength orange and red light, so those rainbows would be fainter and would probably not contain orange or red bands, just blue and green ones.

Also, those places are much farther from the sun, and the light is weaker, so human astronauts might have a hard time spotting the faint rainbows. However, a camera capable of long exposure should be able to pick them up. Maybe one day there will be a long-lived airship exploring the upper atmospheres of Uranus, Neptune, or Titan, which will send back photos of faint blue-green rainbows caused by methane rain. Got a question about the universe?

Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. And he is here, as he is every week, to tell us about the night sky and give us a trivia question and a random space fact. And it's just amazing how much we cram into about six minutes. It does, at least when we remember. Yeah.

Yes. There's that small embarrassment from last week. But thank you for noticing that we forgot to put the trivia question up. But it did go on the website. But we were so caught off guard by our problems with cell phones that I forgot all the detail. But we will not forget this week, and I will not forget

anything. In fact, let us tell you what is in the night sky. Jupiter, very easy to see in the evening sky, looking like a bright star-like object up there in the south. It will get lower over the coming weeks if you're going to check out Jupiter. Hey, check it out now. If you have a small telescope or even some steadily held binoculars, you can

actually see the Galilean satellites, the four large moons of Jupiter, looking like little tiny specks out next to it. I know you've done that frequently. I have. And binoculars, put your elbows on the top of a wall or a car, not a car, but something solid like a wall. Yeah, what can be a car that's not a moving car? Well, the cars bounce. The cars, you know. Oh, shocks.

Yeah, it's bad. You're good. I've tried. Do it. Do it. I've done it, which is why I know you can. So check out Jupiter while it's still hanging out there in the evening sky. And it's moving.

It'll be in the west, west-ish. And getting more westerly. We've got Mars. You still might be able to catch low on the western horizon shortly after sunset. Kind of dim and reddish. And then in the pre-dawn sky, Venus getting lower. But really, really, really bright star-like object in the east. And so that's what's up there. All right.

And if you're playing in star land, I noted that Jupiter kind of hanging out between Spica and Antares. So a little something if you look both directions. Nice straight line. Kind of tough to see, but what the heck. They're bright stars. I don't know what that meant. Let's go on to this week in space history. That was fine.

I thought that was a very nice thing to point out. Three bright points in a line in the sky. It probably is, you know, some kind of an omen. I don't know. Oh, alignment. What is it with people and planetary alignment? But that's a topic for another day. Let's move on to this week in space history.

We had a couple big Apollo things going on. We had Apollo 11 returned during this week in 1969. And Apollo 15 was launched in 1971, first taking the first vehicle up there to drive around with. And a Jeep. Exactly. Happened a few days later. Not a Jeep.

The buggy. The lunar dune buggy. Sorry. No one's ever called it a Jeep, have they? Well, it wasn't made by Jeeps, so why not? It was the lunar rover the Lunar Rover. Lunar Rover. So, on to...

Random Space Fact! If you're looking up in the Martian sky and you're lucky enough to see an eclipse of the sun by its moon Phobos, Phobos is clipping along. It'll cross the sun in about 20 seconds or less. Wow. Pretty cool, huh? I knew it'd be fast, but I didn't realize that. An all partial eclipse. It covers about a third, between a third and a half of the sun. Okay. I have one of my stump the director questions. Would you see it as a point or would you actually be able to, from the surface, would you maybe with the naked eye be able to pick out a little bit of a shape to Phobos?

Oh, no. Phobos is small, but it's very close to the planet. Yeah. And so it actually, as I say, it covers about a third of the sun. You would see it as roughly a circle. Roughly circular. You wouldn't, even though it's elongated, you get the long end pointed towards you, covering about that much. And, in fact, we've seen it from Mars exploration rovers.

There are some very nice astronomy images from the rovers that show Phobos in eclipse of the sun and also Deimos in eclipse. And Deimos also appearing as a circle, but it's much farther away. But 20 seconds. That's amazing. We're having much too much fun here. We'd better move on. Speaking of 20 seconds, time's a-tickin'. So let's go on to the trivia contest.

We asked you, what is the vehicle number for the shuttle orbiter Discovery? What did we find out, Matt? OV103, OV for orbital vehicle? Yes. Okay. Steve Hunt was the guy who got randomly chosen from everybody who had the correct answer this week. Steve is from down under, Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. We are happy to send a shirt down there.

Good on you. Congratulations. How about we figure out a trivia question for this week? Yeah, what do you got? Hey, going to a human space flight for fun, what was the last splashdown, the last return of a spacecraft with humans in it that landed in a body of water in the ocean? The last splashdown, what mission was that? Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to send us your answers. Try to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. When do they need to get that in by? 31st, July 31st at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And we'll make sure that you are part of the next competition. We had somebody who said, I just won. I'm really thrilled. I love my shirt.

And I'm not going to apply again for a while because, you know, it wouldn't be fair. Well, you know, we still haven't made that rule. So, you know, it's up to you folks. You can do it every week, as many people do. It's true, although you still have to go past the fickle hand of fate as random selection enters the process. You do indeed. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about zippers.

Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Fetz. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, zipping up another edition of What's Up. Zip, zip, zip. More exciting explorations to come in upcoming episodes of Planetary Radio. Wherever you hear us, we hope you'll keep tuning in. There's a guide to all our outlets at planetary.org

slash radio slash stations dot html. But who wants to remember that? Just find the current show at planetary.org and follow the links. Our show is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.