Exhibit features Disney artist
Illustrator Willis Pyle, who attended CU until 1937 and sketched characters such as Pinocchio, Bambi and Mr. Magoo, is featured in an exhibit in the Heritage Center, the CU history museum on the third floor of Old Main, until Dec. 17.
The retrospective of Pyle’s work includes original drawings from his student days at CU, sketches for memorable Disney productions and a character from the Academy Award-winning short, Gerald McBoing Boing, as well as his current post-Impressionist paintings.
At the University of Colorado, Pyle was the editor and illustrator of a humor magazine called Colorado Dodo. He responded to a Disney recruitment poster and went to work for the company in Hollywood as an illustrator, especially on Pinocchio. He later worked on Fantasia, Bambi and Snow White. During World War II, he worked in the motion picture unit at the Hal Roach Studio for the Air Corps teaching program.
After the war, Pyle did art for magazines such as Vogue, Harpers and Gourmet. In 1947, he joined United Productions of America, where he received top animation credit for the Academy Award-winning Gerald McBoing Boing and the first Near Sighted Mr. Magoo.
Pyle, 96, still exhibits at New York City’s Montserrat Gallery.
The Heritage Center, which is free and open to the public, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, call 303-492-6329.
Conservation efforts pay off
Conservation efforts at three University of Colorado at Boulder buildings cut campus energy use by 645,000 kilowatt-hours, reduced carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1 million pounds and saved nearly $65,000 in utility costs during the 2009-10 fiscal year.
The savings, achieved at Norlin Library, the Hellems Arts and Sciences Building and the Mathematics Building, were a result of CU-Boulder’s Buff Energy Star program, which provides building proctors reduction goals, tracking tools and models to encourage occupants to par ticipate in resource conservation practices.
The Buff Energy Star program has contributed to CU-Boulder’s 23 percent reduction in campus-wide energy use and overall stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, despite a 14 percent growth in campus facilities.
To be considered for Buff Energy Star status, building proctors must complete an energy audit, take action based on the audit, post energy and water conservation educational materials and show a 5 percent energy reduction over the prior fiscal year.
The building proctors being recognized this year for qualifying their buildings for Buff Energy Star status are John Culshaw of Norlin Library, David Nicoll of the Hellems Arts and Sciences Building and Donna Maes of the Mathematics Building. Each will receive a one-time $1,000 bonus.
For more information, visit www.colorado.edu/conservation.
Dust detector sets record
A University of Colorado at Boulder space dust counter designed, tested and operated by students that is flying aboard NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto now holds the distance record for a working dust detector traveling through space. The instrument is named the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or SDC, after an 11-year-old English girl who named Pluto more than 75 years ago. It reached record-breaking distance of 1.67 billion miles from Earth on Oct. 10.
Designed by a student team from CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, SDC was launched in 2006 aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, which is now slightly beyond the orbit of Uranus.
Dust grains in the solar system are of high interest to researchers because they are the building blocks of the solar system’s planets.
The only other dust-detecting instruments to measure space dust beyond the orbit of Jupiter flew aboard NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft in the 1970s.
For more information on SDC, visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/sdc.
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