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.