Thursday at WorldCon 2 - Space Telescopes, Filk and Fantastical Travel

As people mingled in the Odeon foyer, I overheard someone say "The dolphin communication was really good."

And I plunged straight back in (to a smaller screen) for A Million Miles Beyond Midnight, a presentation about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Bill Higgins is part of the Solar System Ambassador Program, and he started his talk by mentioning the history of astronomy in Ireland, with reference to the telescope named Leviathan which was built at Birr Castle in the 1840s by the third Earl of Rosse. This was exciting, because I've visited Birr Castle, on a family holiday when I was seventeen, and I remember seeing the base of the telescope in the grounds. In those days, it was all a lot more informal than it is now. While ambling around the gardens we got talking to an older lady with secateurs in her hands, who told us all about the great magnolia bush we were looking at. We realised later she must have been one of the family who lived in the Castle.
The talk was actually about an ambitious project for the future, though. The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the administrator who led NASA during the Apollo missions. It will consist of a 6.5m segmented mirror - and it might launch in 2021. All the components need rigorous testing, so the launch date keeps getting pushed back.
All the details are at www.JWST.nasa.gov
It's a collaborative effort with the Canadian Space Agency and European Space Agency, and the mirrors are made of beryllium with a gold coating - it's so big that it has to fold up to fit inside the nose cone of the launch rocket. It will be picking up frequencies into the infra red so it can "see" through dustclouds, and it should be able to look out far enough to see the light of the first stars in the universe, at 0.3 billion years from the Big Bang. It has to be kept very cold, about 40 degrees Kelvin, to work properly, and it will be deployed further out than any previous telescope, at the Legrange Point L2, a million and a half kilometres from Earth. That's well beyond the Moon, and this is why it's so important that it works first time - it's too far out to ever be serviced by astronauts. The Hubble telescope has had regular services, because it's in an orbit far closer to Earth.

After that I went back to the Convention Centre to queue for my wristband for the Opening Ceremony that evening. They had decided to issue wristbands to make it easier for people to get into the Auditorium without vast queues, and it did seem to work. It did mean that we were queuing outside though. There was some good natured discussion about this, and I remembered queuing for the check in at LonCon 3, where the queue was entertained by a filker with a ukulele. The song I remember was Who The Bloody Hell was Tauriel?, a critique of The Hobbit films. Then we had to explain to the volunteer marshalling the queue what filk was. "It was a typo," said someone behind me - which is true. Someone in the early days of Cons was typing the programme, and put 'filk' instead of 'folk', and the term stuck, for SF and Fantasy themed music.

I admired the DeLaurean parked at the entrance to the dealers' room as I made my first pass around, and then I headed to Liffey 2 for the Fantastical Travel Guide. The four panellists took on the personas of characters from their works to explain why anyone would like to visit their worlds - the festivals, scenery, historical buildings, sanitation - and the dangers to unwary travellers.
It soon became clear that three of the worlds had rich and varied cultures, one world was run by a god who was a little bemused by the antics of her humans, and one was really, really grim! For the sanitation question, for instance, he answered "We have swamps...." and for the question about food delicacies of the region, one of the other panellists said to him: "You're going to say stew, aren't you?" At which he suggested taking a rabbit that had been mutated by magical anomalies, adding lots of spices to the boiling pot - after which you throw away the rabbit and drink the spicy liquid!
For the question about interesting architecture, the god recommended seeing her city, which was built of a white substance which was definitely not bone....
The only panellist I was familiar with was Juliet McKenna, the others being a Polish lady called Karolina Fedyk (she was the god), a Frenchman called Lionel Davoust (the one with the grim world), Melissa Caruso and the moderator Marianna Leikomaa.