What is a
Planetarium?
By: Martin Ratcliffe, Exploration Place,
Wichita KS., USA
Jan 2005
A planetarium is a place where the young generations visiting our theaters
get inspired to dream and imagine what "could be" in their lifetimes
when they reach the age we old ones are now.
A planetarium is a place to inspire a generation of kids into careers in
science, technology and education.
A planetarium is a place where we take today's cutting edge research (rovers
landing on Mars driven by undergraduates using VR technology),
orbiting
Saturn, Landing on Titan, and exploring the first billion years after the
big bang - topics that push our visitors imagination to the limit,
and encourage the next generation to think about
these big questions and hopefully decide to try to
answer them.
A planetarium is a place we expose our local community to amazing events of
exploration of our universe, and try to place mundane activities of
human existence in a greater context.
A planetarium is a place they discover the sky, and become encouraged to
make new friends of the constellations, friends that will be there
for entire lifetimes.
How we project images has changed, yet the underlying fundamental reasons
for doing so has not.
Like Mark, I grew up in awe of the giant projectors recreating the night
sky, and still images of the planets. But then Voyager flew around
the planets, JPL produced the first astounding
computer graphics of spacecraft orbiting the
planets. The universe was 3D. But a planetarium couldn't
re-create that. As a kid, that was frustrating to me. But we all
dreamed of what it would be like to sail around
the rings of Saturn as if you were on board a
spacecraft (Cassini-CRAF was being planned), or fly to the Orion
Nebula and have its delicate tendrils surround you.
Well, no thanks to me, but that dream came true. And I still have to pinch
myself to appreciate what I see on the dome - it's a dream come true.
Our audiences sail over the rings of Saturn daily,
just how I saw it in my dreams as a kid.
But think of today's generation. Borne in the age where the Internet has
always been there, digital information abounds, and the only
limitation is bandwidth imagination, ...oh, ...
and funding.
So what are kids dreaming about today when they see with their own eyes a
three dimensional universe under some domes - we are changing their
perception of space - from a 2-D flat image to full motion 3D - we
are changing Earth-centered views of our lives and
the universe around us into showing the expanse of
space its mind-blowing volume represented by the
Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the digital sky surveys now unearthing millions
of galaxies never seen or imagined when our generation were kids.
What are the kids of today dreaming now when they see the digital universe,
when you can manipulate it at will, experimenting with gravity, black
holes, orbits and spacecraft. What do these kids
wish they could do with the digital information we
now have at our fingertips, but technology and our
ability to dream are limited by our own preconceptions of what a planetarium
was when we were kids.
It's their generation - they are the ones we are inspiring, and they are the
ones that will help create the next generation of planetarium
theaters, perhaps far beyond what we can hardly
even dream of. Live star shows in digital theaters,
like our own Stars over Kansas, allow me to appear on the
dome and present the planetary aspect of the next two months along
the lines of my column in Astronomy magazine. They
allow me, in a few minutes, to take a Hubble image
on the day it's released and have it as an all-sky image. It
allows images form Titan taken a billion miles away to be released to
the public at 2 pm and it's on our dome at 4 pm.
Immediacy of current discoveries in astronomy can
be brought to the audience with the impact not
possible previously. All part of a live show that reviews the
constellations, but emphasizes the unique vantage point of being
stuck on earth that reinforces an false
earth-centered view of the sky, and ultimately of
ourselves. Lifting off the earth and seeing the same
constellations high above and the Earth as a glowing blue orb below
introduces a non-earth centered view, a view most astronomers and
planetarians occasionally maintain, and a view that culturally
will take hundreds of years to develop, and needs
to be developed before we become a truly
space-faring species.
And let's not forget, the planetarium we grew up with is still there as
well, alive and inspiring visitors. And the kids perhaps have the
same reaction we did - it's really cool but they
want to fly there - it inspires kids to dream of
what could be.
As nostalgia takes over my mind filling in where memory starts failing,
remember the theater is not for us, it's for the next generation. And
they may well be the ones to take us to the stars.
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