Yearly Archives: 2005

NASA, rocket science

Rocket Folk

Leave a comment

I’m on a bunch of different mailing lists that pass along press releases about astronomy and space science events and projects. Last night I was browsing through the latest ones and came across a NASA TV event that sounds kind of interesting. It’s an interactive visit with Homer Hickham, the guy who wrote “Rockets Boys” that inspired the move “October Sky” He’ll talk about growing up in a poor coal mining town to become a rocket scientist at NASA, and during the program will be able to interact with students logged in from their classrooms.

If you’re interested in participating in the event, check out the details at: NASA Glenn Research Center.

Personally, I think more folks who are involved in the “behind the scenes” details of astronomy and space flight should get “face time” in programs like these.There are a jillion stories of smart, bright, creative, inventive people behind every mission and every observation that makes up the collective databank of science wisdom on this planet.

Planetarium-related

Paradigm Shifty Things

Leave a comment

A while back I wrote about this huge video project we’ve undertaken at the company my husband and I run. Basically it all stems from the planetarium world changing from a realm of starballs and slide projectors to a realm where digital video also paints the dome. The change represents a huge leap from making slides and figuring out how to move them around the dome (using mirrors to reflect images, etc.) to learning video production tools and being worried about resolution and rendering times. All this before you put a single image on the dome or a single word down on tape for the soundtrack. (Tape? What’s tape? These days it’s all digital audio!).

Zeiss projector, courtesy the Exhibit Museum of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Zeiss projector (Carl Zeiss)

Most of us grew up going to see a planetarium instrument that looked something like the ones below.

Lots of memories around those lovely projectors! I first learned to work one at Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, Colorado. There is NOTHING like taking the controls of a star instrument and literally making the universe do what you want it to!

Now, mind you, those instruments aren’t going away, even in this new realm of fulldome video. Some theaters are replacing their opto-mechanical systems with video, but some are opting to have BOTH types of projection systems under one dome.

So, next time you walk into your local planetarium, you might see one of those instruments above, but there might also be something that looks like a box with a huge lens on top of it, all controlled by a computer (maybe even a laptop).

How does this affect us? Well, now we get to be video production types, taking the shows we used to do with slides and mirrors, and applying all the latest techniques to fulldome video production. It’s a huge paradigm shift, to be sure. But it’s also challenging and fun and stimulating.