"Robert A. Heinlein - Shooting Destination Moon (Article)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

few bulbs; they cOme in various brightnesses; and they give as near a point
source of light as the emulsions can recordтАФ more so, in fact. We used
nearly two thousand of them, тАФ strung on seventy thousand feet of wire.
But we got a red halation around the white lights. This resulted from the fact
that Technicolor uses three fihns for the three primary colors. Two of them
are back to back at the focal plane, but the red-sensitive emulsion is a gnatтАЩs
whisker away, by one emulsion thickness. It had. me stumped, but not the
head gaffer. He. covered each~ light with a green gelatin screen, a тАЬgel,тАЭ and
the red halation was gone, leaving a satisfactory white light.
The gels melted down oftener than the bulbs burned out; we had to replace
them each -day at lunch hour and at тАЬwrap up.тАЭ
There was another acute problem of lighting on the lunar set. As we all know,
sunlight on the Moon is the
harshest of plastic light, of great intensity and all from one direction. There is
no blue sky overhead to diffuse the light and fill the shadows. We needed a
sound-stage light which-would. be as intense as that sunlightтАФa single light.
No such light has ever been developed.
During the war, I had a research project which called for the duplication of
sunlight; I can state authoritatively that sunlight has not yet been duplicated.
An arc light, screened by Pyrex, is the closest thing to it yet knownтАФ but the
movies already use- arc lights in great numbers, and the largest arc light
bulb, the тАЬbrute,тАЭ is not nearly strong enough to light an entire sound stage
with sunlight intensityтАФraw sunlight, beating down on the lunar set would
have been equivalent to more than fifteen hundred horse power. There are
no such arc lights.
We traced down several rumors of extremely intense lights. In each case we
found either that the light was not sufficiently intense for an entire sound
stage, or it was monochromaticтАФworse than useless for Technicolor.
We got around it by using great banks of brutes, all oriented the same way
and screened to produce approximate parallelism. Even with the rafters
loaded with the big lights almost past the safety point, it was necessary to
use some cross lighting to fill gaps. The surface of the Moon had some
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degree of тАЬfillтАЭ in the shadows by reflection from cliff walls and the ground; it
is probable that we were forced to fill too much. We used the best that
contemporary engineering providesтАФand next time will gladly use an atomic-
powered simulation of the SunтАЩs atomic-powered light.
The simulation of raw sunlight was better in the scenes involving men in
spacesuits outside the ship in space, as it was not necessary to illuminate an
entire sound stage but only two or three human figures; a bank of brutes
sufficed and no fill was needed, nor wanted, since there was no surrounding
landscape to fill by reflection.

The effect was rather ghostly; the men were lighted as
is the Moon in half phase, brilliantly on one side, totally unhighted and
indistinguishable from the black sky itself on the other side.
This scene in which men are outside the ship in space involved another
special effectтАФthe use of a compressed oxygen bottle as a makeshift rocket
motor to rescue a man who has floated free of the ship. The energy stored by
compressing gas in a large steel bottle is quite sufficient for the purpose. I