Welcome!
When I was four years old, my family and I lived in Brooklyn, New York. My parents decided to trek with my sisters and me all the way to a neighbor’s Long Island summer home for a day or two. The couple had a refracting telescope, the first I’d ever seen. At night, I looked through it at the Moon hanging over the ocean. I was enthralled. This began my lifelong love of worlds.
About age 10, my mother took me to Manhattan to buy a second-hand, 60mm refractor. I still have it. It was extraordinarily heavy. I lugged it to the NJ Transit bus and then home. To this day I lift the case and wonder how. The first time I viewed the Moon with this scope my imagination soared. I felt I was seeing a world as if orbiting or flying over it.
The movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released when I was an impressionable teenager. It inspired me to wonder how space stuff REALLY looked if you could go there. I still do. That’s what this website is all about.
While studying computer science I started painting with oils, then acrylics. When I purchased my first airbrush, the dealer told me you can’t put acrylics in it. I did anyway. Computer animations in the early 1990’s relied on recording to videotape frame by frame. I played and recorded directly out of memory instead.
I once employed 16 computers taking 22 hours each to render five seconds of an animation showing a moving fleet of spaceships. Assembling all the pieces took even longer. Now space artists and I can do this with a laptop in minutes.
Technology has changed a lot in the last three decades. We have 3D animation, interactive Virtual Reality and more. What hasn’t changed is the beauty and wonder of space. May you find inspiration for both here.
Lonny
At the page “VIrtual Reality“, play with objects and worlds with any pointing device, especially fingers. Rotate, tilt, zoom in and out.
For the planet Mercury in color, the listed links give you short videos narrated by my wife, who I have still not paid.
At “Gallery” are animations, videos, and space art. The latter is in chronological order. You can see how my style and technology.has changed over decades. I’ve been away from illustration and painting for a long time. I’m planning to return.
A Compact Biography
- Born
- About 32.18% of the way between a Life magazine editor’s comment that the figures in Bonestell’s artwork showing humans on Saturn’s moon Mimas were “put in merely to give scale” and the moment when humans first walked on the Moon.
- Lonny Buinis Observatory at UACNJ
- dedicated April, 2016
- Employment
- self
- Raritan Valley Community College, North Branch, NJ
- 2021 retired
- 1995 Instructional Designer, Office of Instructional Technology
- 1990 Assistant Director of Planetarium
- Trailside Nature and Science Center, Mountainside, NJ
- 1982 Director of Planetarium
- Education
- Formal: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
- 1974 B.S. Physics
- 1976 M.S. Computer Science
- Informal:
- 1972 space art
- 1976 airbrush painting
- 1990 digital graphics
- 1992 3-D modeling and animation
- 1996 Web design
- 1997 Learning Management Systems (WebCT, Blackboard CE, WebStudy, Canvas)
- 2006 Virtual Reality objects
- 2017 video editing
- 2018 eBook publication
- 2019 Science Fiction
- 2022 eCommerce
- 2024 Blender physics plugins
- 2025 WordPress
- Formal: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
- Hobbies
- clarinet, tenor saxophone
- numismatics
- walking, bicycling
- spelunking
- health/nutrition
- “FAMOUS CHEW”
Fiber/Family/Friends, Antioxidants, Minerals, Omega oils+, Ubiquinol, Sleep,
Collagen/Creativity/Curiosity, Hyaluronic acid/Humor, Exercise, Water
- “FAMOUS CHEW”
- poetry, science fiction
- globes
- history of astronomy
- Favorite Colors
- Space Artists who inspired me
- 1960’s Chesley Bonestell
- 1968 David Hardy
- 1969 Don Dixon
- 1970 Ludek Pesek
- 1972 Don Davis
- 1977 Ron Miller
- 1980 Pamela Lee and William Hartmann
- 2016 Lucy West
- 2022 Pat Rawlings