Dixon, an affable, slightly geeky man with intense blue eyes and a quick step, can be found most days at Griffith Observatory, where he works as art director, overseeing new planetarium shows and the facility's artwork.
But on Fridays — his day off — he's usually in his garage working on some extraterrestrial art project.
Dixon, who grew up in Rialto, drew his first picture at age 4 after catching a glimpse of a meteor from the window of his grandfather's Studebaker. From then on, he was constantly sketching rockets and crater-filled landscapes.
It was a no-brainer that he majored in physics at UC Berkeley with the intention of becoming an astronomer, but his artistic career eventually overtook his studies.
He started selling color slides of paintings of Saturn's rings and Martian landscapes to schools and planetariums. Magazines started buying his art, and he landed his first cover in 1974 with an image of Jupiter hanging over the desert-like landscape of its moon Io.
Astronomers have made technical drawings of the planets ever since there were telescopes, but it was an artist named Chesley Bonestell who took the craft and lifted it into mainstream art.
Bonestell, born in San Francisco in 1888, started as an architect who helped design the Chrysler Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. At 50, he began another career, painting backgrounds for movies, including "Citizen Kane" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
"He always had an interest in astronomy, and he figured if he combined his interest in light and shadow, photorealist techniques, he could do something nobody did before," said Ron Miller, 58, a Virginia space artist and historian.
Bonestell, who settled in the Los Angeles area, began to sell his space paintings to magazines. "His pictures of the solar system were indistinguishable from travel snapshots in Life magazine in the mid-'40s," Miller said.
Bonestell aimed for scientific accuracy and sought out scientists such as rocket expert Wernher von Braun. Bonestell illustrated a series of articles by Von Braun about manned space flight in Collier's magazine in the 1950s, which have been credited with helping kick-start the Golden Age of manned spaceflight, Miller said.
Others artists quickly followed. Today, the International Assn. of Astronomical Artists has more than 120 members in 20 countries. Some still paint with traditional media, but most create their works on a computer.
Miller likens space artists to the 19th century painters who depicted the sublime vistas of the American wilderness.
"We are the last surviving members of the Hudson River School," he said.
