And helped us reach our goal, then go on to surpass it by 17% before the deadline brought pledges to a close. This exhibit would not have been possible without their generous support and we can't thank them enough. Our spirits were greatly lifted as the pledges began coming in, so it wasn't only funding that was needed. As a result, our first Kickstarter Project is now in the history books, as it were, and it was a great success—thanks in no small part to our wonderful backers who made this all possible. You can read all that goes into this exhibit and the schedule that we maintain throughout the conference in the Help A Starving Artist and Help Yourself companion article.

We thought you would like to take a look at our booth and, alongside, the digital 3D design model that we created in planning our exhibit. Just a small look into the attention to detail and care that we take in everything we do. It makes all the difference—and you are worth it.

From left to right in the real booth you can see the 1/3 scale model of the Ascending Stars Lifetime Space Achievement Award Master Sculpture on a turntable atop the cabinet, our display case holding bottle stoppers, small dishes, a Red Velvet glass cupcake and atop the cabinet one of the Steampunk Rockets. On the counter next to the cabinet are some small awards, our cards and a tower to accept business cards from visitors to the booth. When they drop a card in, they receive a glass pendant necklace as a gift.

Along the back wall at left center, on its own turntable, is the Ascending Stars Lifetime Space Achievement Individual Award sculpture that was presented on Wednesday to Dr. Charles Elachi, Director of JPL, the HD monitor running our Impact Movie, a Rising Earth sculpture, a 13" Fused Glass Galaxy Platter, an 11" Fused Glass Rose Nebula Platter, a 10" Blown Glass Jupiter, the Ascending Stars Lifetime Space Achievement Individual Award prototype, our illustration portfolio book and, on its own pedestal, the Planetary Society Cosmos Award spare; its twin Blown Glass Saturn sculpture now residing in Stephen Hawking's office at Cambridge.

On the table against the right wall are what's left of 200 A New Ocean prints that I signed and gave away as our tribute to the Space Shuttle program; soon to come to a close.

Here, we wish to recognize and thank our wonderful backers who believed in us and put their money where their minds are, in order to say in a demonstrative and helpful way that they support the arts and our efforts to continue creating beautiful things. Each individual supported us with pledge amounts from $1.00 to $1,000.00!

We extendA Heartfelt Thank You to each and every one!

We are in production now, creating the Rewards for each of them; according to the pledge level that they chose. It is happy work, indeed.

Every so often, I receive queries in my mailbox asking about various topics. Today, I was asked an astronomy question that intrigued me:

"Under enormous magnification, such as the HUBBLE - WHY ON EARTH don't individual stars, when focused on, look absolutely ENORMOUS. I mean - focus on a GALAXY, and you see an object otherwise 'apparently' tiny, blown up to be quite visible in detail. However I have yet to see a SINGLE IMAGE of ANY star, that makes it look even REMOTELY like our SUN. Please explain to my satisfaction and I will be DELIGHTED."

This is perhaps a not so uncommon misconception. So, I set about to compile the answer, replied in detail and I share it with you here:

Well, stars are small. Compared to the structure of galaxies, which are made up of billions of stars, one star makes up only a very tiny portion of that gathering we see in an image. Our galaxy is composed of 100-400 billion stars, depending upon the estimation method used to compute the value. So, at best, our Sun makes up one one hundred billionth (1/100,000,000,000) of the galaxy and the distance to the next star out from us is huge. It takes the light emitted from it 4.2 years to reach us. The measurements we are talking about, compared to the cross section of a star's disk, are enormous.

The Crab Nebula in Optical Wavelengths

Our Sun is 865,000 miles (1.4 million km) in diameter and is, on average, 92,955,887.6 miles (149,597,999.97373 km) distant. But seen at the distance of, say, the Crab Nebula; which is about 6,500 light years, it appears really small.

One light year is the distance that a ray of light travels while we orbit the Sun once and equals 5,878,499,814,135.1 miles (9,460,528,404,879.4 km). You can see that 865,000 miles in comparison to 5.878 trillion miles is pretty tiny. It would take 96,997,124,660,000,000 Suns lined up next to each other to measure the distance to the nebula. At that distance, stars just cannot be resolved by today's instruments and they appear as points. The only way we can see them at all is because they are very bright.

In comparison to a galaxy, a star's diameter is even smaller. The Crab Nebula in the example above, is in our galaxy. The nebula's major diameter, as seen from Earth, is 11 light years. That is 74,761,519.54 times the diameter of the Sun. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. We are 28,000 light years from its center and 22,000 light years from the nearest edge, so the Crab Nebula, at "only" 6,500 light years, is a lot closer to us.

The Andromeda Galaxy - © Robert Gendler

Seeing a galaxy in an image and realizing how large it really is, you can now begin to (although we never really can) grasp the relative sizes that we are dealing with. The Andromeda galaxy, once considered to be our "sister" galaxy due to its like size and shape, has been shown to be much larger. It is composed of approximately 1,000,000,000,000 stars, is 220,000 light years in diameter and is 2,540,000 light years distant from us—33,076 times the distance to the Crab Nebula. That's a LOT of Sun diameters. If you know where to look in the night sky, you can see it without a telescope. One star in it may be visible as a disk some day but the technology to be able to do that is unimaginable at this point.

VY Canis Majoris

The Universe is a Big Place and I hope that you are delighted to be part of it and understand it a bit better. When next you go out to look at the night sky, reflect on these distances and your troubles, however large they may seem, will just melt away.

It was upon sending my reply that I noticed the email address from which the query came: [username]@uoregon.edu

I hope you get an "A". ;-)

I ran across a couple of articles today, one by Paul Gilster of the Tau Zero Foundation on Centauri Dreams entitled Space Art: Reviving the Imagination and another by Jeff Foust of The Space Review on When Space and Art Intersect. It's really good to see the resurgence in this area in so many circles and I thought I'd take a little break from The Making of the 21st Century Orrery series and get back to my original passion that started all this — Space Art. That is, Space Art in the classical sense that people know it; 2D paintings.

We work increasingly in 3D of both types: digital (modeling/rendering/animation) and physical (our glass sculpture), of which the Celestial Gears Orrery and the Celestial Winds Mobile are but two. Physical 3D is the most demanding because, unlike digital 3D and 2D, you actually have to build it and make it work. A flick of the wrist and illusion don't work here.

Painting in 2D with traditional media was the beginning that has taken me a lot of places; really cool places. Places I most likely would never have been afforded access, were it not for what I do. I worked hard at my craft, becoming what I term a "Method Painter". Like actors who immerse themselves into their character in order to more fully communicate the person they are playing, I immerse myself in the location that I am painting in order to feel it around me and bring more of it into the image. Consider it painting en plein air... without the air.

I go—I travel.
Gets me out of the house.
Waaaaay out of the house.

I work on taking the painting process apart to examine its inner workings; find out what the mind expects to see and provide that. More often than not, a painter gets caught up in the destination, without allowing themselves to see the path. In 1987, I taught Alan Bean how to successfully paint Kapton, the shiny, wrinkled insulation shielding that covers sensitive areas of spacecraft. It had confounded him for months, trying to get it to look right. He was too close to the problem, was trying to direct it, and didn't see it for what it was—reflective chaos; like the surface of a lake. You can't paint chaos deliberately. You can't "think into it", it's too complex and the mind just doesn't work that way... for most of us anyway. Just like clouds, and the painting of them, they both have to evolve on their own or they lack authenticity and depth. So, I told him to stop thinking, let go and "Paint Stupid". Get into the Zen of it. Eventually, Kapton will start coming out all on its own and it'll be hard to stop.

Art takes us all many places, most times without our giving it a second thought that this is actually happening at the time. I'm an Artist-Engineer. I see the universe from a different perspective than most. Early in my career, I coined a phrase that is still on the front page of my Space Art website, Imperial Earth:

"Throughout all of human exploration, Art, in one form or another, has always been our first vehicle." - 1970

Some may take that as an absurd statement or be surprised at its sweeping nature. It is, however, closer to the essential truth than they might think.

These artworks can take many forms, many of which most would not initially consider to be "art": Engineering drawings of spacecraft to be built, scribblings on a blackboard trying to communicate to one's colleagues a difficult concept or a stick drawn across wet sand when a moment of inspiration comes while walking on the beach are three that come immediately to mind. They may or may not be beautiful to look at from a purely aesthetic point of view but they do have beauty and, if the design is sound, elegance. They certainly cause us to travel to places unknown and currently unreachable by other means. In addition, they show us how we can get there someday.

Without these drawings, nothing so complex as a spacecraft could ever be built. BUT the drawing of them, and the artists' concept paintings that are derived from them that the public most often sees, are equally essential parts of this journey. Like the paintings of the artists of the Hudson River School: Cole, Bierstadt, Moran, Church, to name only four—and there are many, whose works depict the early explorations of the American West, these works many times were created as promotional, yet they now are in museums. They painted these not only to appraise the investors who funded these treks but also to bring viewers along with them as they traveled the uncharted wilderness, witnessing unbelievably glorious vistas and inspiring those back in civilization to Go West.

Many contemporary Space Artists consider themselves as parallels to these great masters of the 19th Century. Where their counterparts could travel to remote locations and record what they saw on canvas, our position is to observe, absorb, digest and distill data from many sources; traveling in our minds and transforming it all into an image that viewers can relate to, be inspired by and perhaps propel them to action. That action could be continuing to build the vehicle when the going gets tough or launching a student into a career of science or engineering... or art. The gathering and blending of what many think are disparate disciplines is what makes what we do so special. We talk in many languages of technology but the message is the same:

"Look! Isn't this Cool!? Let's go do it."

Have you been inspired by a painting you saw? Has one changed your life direction and set you on a course that you never imagined? Let us know.

Back when the Big Sur Fire was raging and threatening to burn our studio to the ground, it felt really good the first time that it settled upon us. Kept the fire from advancing so quickly, due to the moisture content of the atmosphere. That fire burned for more than two months. When the clouds came, it wasn't over, by any means, but it sure was welcome and helped us to relax just a tiny bit.]]> http://blog.imperialearth.com/science/weather/head-in-the-clouds/feed/ 0 http://blog.imperialearth.com/science/weather/and-another/ http://blog.imperialearth.com/science/weather/and-another/#comments Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:54:00 +0000 BJ http://imperialearth.spherical.org/articles/and-another/ Managed to get into bed before the Sun came up this time; but not by much. Lot's to do when you're working two jobs, both of them overtime; Glassblower by day—Internet Technologies Wizard by night. At least for the time being—it'll be back to 3D Modeling once the social networking project has gone mainstream enough to turn my attention to other tasks.

Just finished a short blowing session. Well, it was 6 hours but we didn't get started until 15:30, after I took care of a few page edits and read the mail/news. Made eight