Back when I first started doing planetarium shows, the industry was just waking up to the idea of actually buying a planetarium show from someone outside the individual facilities. For a long time (and to some extent today) planetarians devise their own programs and lectures. And that’s great. When I was a planetarium lecturer, I did the same thing. But I also realized — as do so many others — that I couldn’t produce everything myself. And writing shows for facilities all around the world has given me a great deal of insight into what planetarians want for their audiences. Mark and I sat down one time a few years back and figured out that we had distributed hundreds of shows to more than 500 facilities around the world. There are only about 2500 facilities in the world, but they’re not all open, some are very scantily equipped, and others are Starlabs that can’t run our shows. There are maybe a thousand potential clients for ours (or anybody’s) shows, and even then, many producers sell to a much smaller market than we do.
There’s not really any standardization in the business, unless you count the fact all planetariums have star machines. Some have slide projectors — lots of ’em. Others don’t. Some have video; others don’t. A very few have fulldome digital systems requiring expensive animations for shows; but most don’t. Being a show producer for such a varied group of facilities is pretty complex. But, at the heart of all of these systems, you still have to have a story to tell. And that’s where I come in. I help tell the stories of the cosmos. Mark produces them (or now, I do, too). We mate music and the spoken word and imagery to bring the cosmos to the audience.
To paraphrase the old line, “There are a million stories in the Naked Cosmos.” And there are. Over the years I’ve written about trips to Mars, explorations of the outer planets, studies of the galaxies, starhopping and constellation outlines, Hubble Space Telescope discoveries, and the fun of stargazing. That’s always been my goal — to let people know that astronomy and space science are fun. Sure, they’re complex, but nobody who lets the stars touch them minds the complexity. In fact, that’s part of the fun and the challenge of astronomy. And if I can raise people’s consciousness through planetarium shows, then I don’t mind the complexity. And the hard work.
Monthly Archives: January 2004
Showing off What Hubble Does Best
I just finished work on a planetarium show about Hubble Space Telescope discoveries. I’ve written other shows about HST before, and this is sort of the “latest and greatest” one, and one where I really don’t know the ending. We’ve all been talking about the last HST servicing mission being cancelled, thus sentencing HST to its fate a few years earlier than everybody expected. Now it appears that Congress really does have the last say about this, and several folks have called for a re-investigation of the decision. So, the story’s not over yet. And, up there in orbit around Earth, HST continues on its merry way, sending back great images and science data (not mutually exclusive) for all of us to study and enjoy.
Well, rather than focus on the political aspects of HST’s “human side,” I spend all my time in this planetarium show talking about the great science it has done. It’s not an easy task. There’s a LOT to talk about, and a lot more to come. In fact, the most difficult thing about an HST planetarium show is choosing what NOT to show. There’s only so much time in the program, and in most planetaria, there are only so many slides one can cycle through in the course of a show. Sure we can throw in some video, for those who HAVE video projection capability, but for those who don’t, we’re kind of limited by the slides. I’ve chosen nearly 200 really great images and told a story of cosmic exploration using them as illustration. As I spend time looking at the sights that HST has seen for us, I’m impressed again with just how marvelous this machine has been. And what a wonderful time the astronomers who use it must be having when they open their data sets. Are they like kids opening presents? I like to think so. Or at least HOPE so.
One of the images I’ll be using in the show is a study of a planetary nebula that lies about 5,000 light-years away from Earth. It’s called “The Eskimo” Nebula because it looks like an intricate furry hood that an Eskimo might wear. The “parka” is really a disk of material surrounding a dying, Sun-like star. Inside the cloud is a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. The “face” consists of a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star’s intense “wind” of high-speed material. The story behind this apparition is fascinating. The star that formed this cloud began to lost much of its mass to space about 10,000 years ago. Before that time it had gone through what’s called the “red giant” phase, breathing out a ring of dense material that collected around the star. That ring is actually moving out from the star at about 115,000 kilometers per hour. Hot on its heels (so to speak) are high-velocity stellar winds, moving out from the star at 1.5 million kilometer per hour. They are shoving material above and below the star, creating elongated bubbles. Each bubble is about one light-year long and about half a light-year wide.
This is just one of a dozen or so planetary nebulae I’m presenting in my show, and while I can’t talk about them in excruciating detail, I can at least show people just what our Sun might look like in 5 or 6 billion years when it starts down the path toward planetary nebula-hood. Fun stuff!