Category Archives: astronomy

astronomy, fulldome video, Planetarium, Planetarium-related

You Find the Darndest Things in Shopping Malls

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Like Planetarium Instruments!

I’m a planetarian.  You know, one of those people who spends time in a domed theater… talking about stars. I’m also a science writer. I write scripts for fulldome shows. And I write books. And astronomy exhibits for such places as Griffith Observatory and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And this blog. As a writer I wear so many hats that I need a new hatrack to keep them all straight.  But, the thread that ties all my writing together is that it’s about astronomy and space science — and related topics.

Your lovely author, posing with the Zeiss planetarium projector in the Galleria Mall in Jena, Germany. Copyright 2010 Carolyn Collins Petersen

Recently I put on my planetarium fulldome show production hat and went to Jena, Germany for a fulldome film festival. Since my husband and I create fulldome videos, it seemed like a fun thing to do, and we were asked to sit on a jury to select a “best of show”.  On May 3, we landed in Frankfurt, Germany and took the train to Jena, which boasts one of the world’s oldest planetarium theaters, which itselfs boasts the latest in Zeiss planetarium and fulldome projection capabilities.  Jena is the home of the Carl Zeiss company, which creates planetarium instruments, and optics for microscopes and other products. For four days we watched fulldome videos, and when we weren’ t doing that, we spent time exploring that lovely university town.

Our hotel was next to a wonderful shopping mall called the Goethe Gallerie, and as we walked through on the first day, we noticed a slightly different kind of mall ‘art’ display:  a planetarium instrument!  Imagine our great delight at seeing this symbol of an instrument we grew up with in college and spent many years with thereafter.

The fulldome festival was a lot of fun. We got to see 26 professional shows, plus 34 student works. We even got to premiere a clip from a project we’re doing with Dome3D, called SpacePark360: Geodesium Edition. We came home with a lot of refreshed enthusiasm for our productions, and a great appreciation for a town that could display a planetarium instrument in its shopping mall!  Clearly the folks in Jena love and appreciate astronomy!

astronomy, galaxies, hubble space telescope, musings

Billions and Billions of….

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Stars in Billions and Billions of Galaxies

Take a good look at this picture.  Go ahead, embiggen it. Check it out. I’ll wait.

A view of 12 billion years of cosmic history -- courtesy the Hubble Space Telescope.

What you’re looking at are galaxies. There are 7,500 of them in this image, which covers a very small angular area of space. The most distant galaxies lie more than 13 billion light-years away. That means the light captured in this image of those galaxies was shining a few hundred million years AFTER the Big Bang — the event that resulted in the birth of the universe.  The closest galaxies in this image emitted their light about a billion years ago.

When you look at this image, you’re gazing at a slice of cosmic time, a snapshot of galaxies in nearly every stage of formation and evolution.  If you looked in every direction, across the entire sky, the view would be similar to this — galaxies as far as we can detect. Billions and billions of galaxies, each one comprised of anywhere from a few hundred million stars to hundreds of billions of stars.

Think about that as you gaze at this picture.

That’s a lot of stars.  And, you have to wonder if we really are the only ones out here in this vast cosmos to appreciate that fact.  Are we the only life capable of looking up and wondering if any of those other stars have planets and life? I often think about that concept — as I  wonder what the future of the cosmos will be; and think about the glories of past histories in other galaxies — glories we can only appreciate as a dim glow from a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away.