Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

I'll be giving two slide talks and two panels at Capricon this coming weekend. Thirty Capricons, and I've attended every one.  Wow.

Capricon (near Chicago) is supposed to have a teleconference hookup with Boskone in Boston.  It will be interesting to learn whether this works well.  I think it would be cool to be on a transcontinental panel someday-- and there will be lots of people at Boskone I'd like to converse with.

K will also be a panelist on "Mental Health Treatment: How Far Have We Really Come?" Saturday  at 10 AM.

Here's my own schedule.  See you there.

Searching for Weirdness in the Vaults of Life Magazine

Time: Friday - 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Other
Location: Birch A
Panelists: Bill Higgins

Puppets, Jetpacks, and Ballet on the Moon: Recently Google placed online TWO MILLION images shot by Life magazine photographers. There's something for everyone in this mountain of negatives, from flying cars to behind-the-scenes photos of classic science fiction movies. Bill Higgins conducts a tour of Twentieth Century oddities lurking in the archive.

Assault On The Moon: Chasing Lunar Water

Time: Saturday - 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Science
Location: Ravinia B
Panelists: Brother Guy Consolmagno, Bill Higgins

In a surprising development last fall, observations from several spacecraft found evidence for water molecules distributed widely across the face of the Moon. Then NASA's LCROSS spacecraft, crashing deliberately, uncovered another trove of frozen water near the Moon's south pole.  Join Bill Higgins and Brother Guy Consolmagno to review these novel results.

The Golden Age of 2010

Time: Saturday - 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Other
Location: Ravinia A
Panelists: Brother Guy Consolmagno, Phyllis Eisenstein (M), Bill Higgins, Fred Pohl, Bill Thomasson

What would SF pioneers think of the world today?

Cancelled TV Shows You Should Love

Time: Saturday - 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Media
Location: Birch B
Panelists: Michael D'Ambrosio, Bill Higgins, Phoenix, Jim Rittenhouse, delphyne woods (M)

From Firefly to The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. to Wonderfalls, there are many shows that existed for less than a season but are available on DVD. What are some of these flops that you should know about and watch with the sadness of knowing there will never be any more episodes?

It's 1958. Satellites are in the sky. The Moon seems within our grasp.

Life runs a spread about the Moon in its 15 December issue. Lunar science, photos of the Army's new Moon rocket, an essay about how the Earth is affected by the Moon...

They commission the great Boris Artzybasheff, famous for his grotesque covers for Time, to paint an illustration of history's great Moon stories. It's a two-page spread.


It's totally classic Artzybasheff, and I love it.

(Click on the photo. Then be sure to use the little magnifying glass to zoom in and see detail.)

As I mentioned Monday, I was searching Google's Life magazine photo archive for photos by Allan Grant taken in 1949 or 1950. I was hoping to find previously-unrevealed photos from the set of Destination Moon, the classic science fiction movie co-written by Robert Heinlein.

Google limits the search result to 200 images from this archive, even if a larger number satisfy the search condition. So I was trying "allan grant 1950" to turn up a somewhat different set of pictures than those revealed by "destination moon."

Jackpot. I found 86 more pictures of the DM set. They are tagged Preparation "Moon Ballet."

Recall that I previously found a couple of strange pictures of ballet dancers cavorting on the set. Turns out Grant shot many more. They are mysterious.

( More photos here )
It is evident that someone staged an elaborate performance, by people wearing dance costume, on the set of Destination Moon. Part of this performance involved suspending the dancers on wires. It incorporated both the full-size version of the rocket ship Luna (one dancer is seen clinging to rungs of the ladder on its hull) and the smaller model seen in the "distance."

We may reasonably infer that this surreal performance was filmed, probably using the same cameras, lighting, and crew. The film may or may not have used the Technicolor process that DM used.

It seems very probable that this shooting would have taken place after DM wrapped, or anyway after it completed shooting on its lunar set. This suggests sometime after the second week of December 1949. According to the shooting schedule I found among Heinlein's papers, the film was scheduled to complete shooting on Friday, 9 December, the 23rd day of filming. This was also the final day using the Moon set.

The Moon Ballet has not been mentioned in anything I have read about Destination Moon. Bill Patterson has reviewed all the drafts of the screenplay, and has discovered no plans to include ballet scenes.

Who are the dancers? Who directed and choreographed this? For what film (short? feature?) was the performance intended? Was the film ever released? Is it available on video now?

How do we find out?

1. Google "lunar ballet" or "moon ballet" or similar keywords. (Hey! Apollo 17 visited a Ballet Crater!)

2. Find someone who knows a lot about dancers working near Los Angeles in 1949. See if they can identify any of the people in the photos.

3. Run down the credits of Destination Moon's production designer, set decorator, camera operators, lighting people, etc. to see if they are credited with any ballet-type films around 1950.

4. Find someone who was involved in shooting DM, and ask.

5. See if Allan Grant's estate, or Life magazine, has any information about this shoot beyond that which made it into Google.

Destination Moon's production company was Eagle Lion Films. According to Wikipedia, their lot was at 7950 Santa Monica Boulevard; according to the George Pal Productions callsheet of 18 November 1949, DM shot on stages #2 and #3.

Are there good online forums that attract people who know a lot about Hollywood dancing?

Do you know anybody who can help learn more about this mystery? Pass this along.

Recently, Patrick Nielsen Hayden linked to an essay about the artwork on the new U.S. passports.

I learned that alongside images of flags, Liberty Bells, Mt. Rushmore Presidents, and so forth, the passport has a bit of astronomical art.

I love the idea of illustrating America's exploration of space on our coins, stamps, and passports[1], so at first this seemed exciting. Soon, it seemed disappointing.



It's Pioneer 10, or maybe 11, mighty close to the Moon, with the Earth in the background[2]. I will leave it as an exercise for the student to prove that the point of view is about 450,000 kilometers from the Earth.

The Moon shows realistic detail, but, curiously, the Earth does not. There is not a cloud to be seen. Instead we see the outline of North America. It looks like a scene from a 1950s science fiction movie, before artists understood that the Earth really looks fairly fluffy and white when seen from space.

Also, the terminator appears to run from Kiribati in the Pacific to the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic. The subsolar point is near the northern Yukon. I haven't done the math, but this seems wrong for a planet inclined 23.5 degrees to its orbital plane.

( Another surprise )

(By the way, here's an essay on the aesthetics of the new passport illustrations.)

[1] And I encourage other nations to do the same with their own space achievements.

[2] I doubt either Pioneer came quite this close to the Moon, but I have to allow the artists some license...

This coming Thursday, 22 September, in Chicago, you can attend an advanced screening of the new movie Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D. The film re-creates moments in the Apollo moonwalks in the wide-screen, three-dimensional IMAX projection process. As the filmmakers say, "Only twelve have walked on the Moon. You're next."

I've been helping to organize this event, which will raise funds for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and the National Space Society. Captain James Lovell, of Apollo 13 and Apollo 8, was kind enough to provide us with an invitation letter, which I'll append.

The Navy Pier complex is in downtown Chicago, at the lake, at 600 East Grand Avenue.

Visit http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2233 to obtain tickets for the preview.

Watch a trailer at jttp://www.apple.com/trailers/imax/imax_magnificent_desolation.html.

Extensive notes on the film's production may be found at http://www.imax.com/magnificentdesolation/site/downloads/notes.pdf.
( Invitation from astronaut James Lovell )