The Sirius Lookers Astronomy Club hosted a presentation by Chris Ford, a former Pixar business director and expert in astronomical visualization and computer-generated imagery, at the Sedona Public Library on April 16.

Ford, who now serves as CEO and COO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, spoke about the connections between real-world astronomy and Hollywood fantasy, highlighting how the visual effects in movies and animation are often grounded in scientific principles.

“The visual demands of scientific communication and cinematic storytelling became completely intertwined,” Ford said before showing a 1979 film produced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This is one of the most important and consequential short films ever produced in history. But few people ever realize it. This is the Voyager animations which were produced to simulate what Voyager would do when it flew past Jupiter and Saturn; it’s the very first rendered, computer-generated film that entered the public consciousness … From this one sequence emerged an entire revolution in the way movies are made using computer-generated imagery.”

Ford said that before the release of the 1979 Voyager animations used for mission planning, most of the public’s exposure to CGI animations had come from rudimentary renderings resembling wire mesh, such as the display on Luke Skywalker’s targeting computer while piloting his X-Wing in 1977’s “Star Wars: A New Hope.”

He added that some of camera techniques used during the 1979 JPL film would become commonplace in filmmaking over the coming decades, such as having a camera track an object through Saturn’s rings as billions of pieces of ice, dust and rocks flew past. Such camera shots were common in “Star Trek,” the Gene Roddenberry franchise. Roddenberry’s 1982 “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” was the first film use of fractals to generate a planetary landscape.

“But all of that technology first happened in movements for ‘Star Trek,’” Ford said, discussing how particle simulations influenced the educational films that planetariums screen for visitors. “So you see that interplay, with astronomy and movies, but in this case, a movie generating the tools to visualize [for] the public how astronomical phenomena work.”

For Ford, the technological progression of computer graphics has followed a logarithmic S-curve, with computational capabilities expanding exponentially while gradually approaching theoretical physical and economic limits. In the 1970s, computer graphics began to emerge as a field. By the 1990s, advancements enabled photorealistic planetary simulations. In the 2010s, real-time, physically accurate renderings became achievable. By the 2020s, the field had progressed to include AI-driven visualizations.

“The [idea] is that technology generally starts off slowly in their development, and then they take off, but they approach physical and economic limits, and they slow down,” Ford said. “Aviation is the classic example. Everyone was flying around in propeller planes until about 1935 and we went … to supersonic aircraft made of titanium [in a matter of decades]. And then things started to slow down. We don’t travel around in supersonic airliners because, even though it’s physically possible, the economics don’t support it because of the cost of fuel. So that notion of the S-curve and technology can be applied to the area of photorealistic simulation and visualization.”

CGI requires the simulation of physics and light paths through equations that can be optimized to run as fast as possible, and Ford discussed how technological evolution has made the process more efficient and allowed for increasingly complex renderings.

“We may not have 23rd-century technology, but the immersive environments that we’re going to be able to create is coming up fast,” Ford said. “It leads to the true democratization of astronomy … I’ve got a much more positive and, I hope, uplifting view that everything I’m showing means that you and I could experience what spacecraft and space missions and what astronomical parameters look like, and participate in that. We don’t have to be astronauts, and then we could go out and just have a great meal afterwards.”

The Sirius Lookers Astronomy Club meets at 5 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month at the main branch of the Community Library in Sedona. The club will also host a Community Astronomy Night at the library from 8 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21. Attendees will have the opportunity to view distant galaxies and the red planet Mars through telescope.