What Does It Mean
For a good many years I’ve been a writer. One of my mainstays is planetarium shows (or, if you like, in today’s new digital world, I write for fulldome video). Last week I attended the once-every-two-years meeting of the International Planetarium Society, held this year in Chicago, Illinois. We had around 600 attendees from around the world, and it was a very busy and rewarding meeting.
That’s the Adler over to the left. It actually has two domed theaters and one “flat screen” theater, and we had several sessions there throughout the week, seeing each other’s shows (I had one in the mix) as well as Adler’s panoply of presentations.
During the meeting, we discussed what we are, as planetarians. The word “planetarian” wasn’t in the dictionary for a long time; it now is online. It is defined in the Random House Unabridged dictionary as:
| 1. | a staff member at a planetarium. |
| 2. | an inhabitant of a planet. |
| 3. | of or pertaining to a planetarian. |
All of us fit under the second category, so that’s kind of a gimme. Those of us who work at planetariums or with planetariums (or planetaria, if you like) fit under categories 1 and 3, interchangeably.
But, there should be a fourth description that tells what we actually DO in those domed theaters. There are many tasks that we accomplish, but they are mostly all related to telling good stories in the dome about astronomy and space science. So, for example, I write scripts and produce shows that accomplish that goal, and together Mark and I have created many shows that planetarium theaters use.
There are others who build equipment for the theaters, install it, test it, and then go out and sell it to theaters. They’re also planetarians. There are those who use the domed theaters as classrooms, or visualization labs to test new visual ideas. All are equally valid members of the society of planetarians.
I think that the fourth definition is dimensionless in that it really is expandable and includes people who work at traditional planetariums as well as at the new digital fulldome theaters. We all work in the same kind of domed space, telling stories of the cosmos.