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astronomy, astronomy education, astronomy news, astrophysics, fulldome, fulldome shows, galaxies, hubble space telescope, Loch Ness Productions, Mars, starbirth, stargazing, stellar ages

Across the Light-years from Andromeda

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Revisiting the Past

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Light Years from Andromeda, 2009

This week Mark and I are releasing a fulldome show version of the very first Loch Ness Productions planetarium show I ever wrote, called Light Years from Andromeda. It tells one of the most important stories in astronomy and cosmology — that of cosmic distance, and humanity’s quest to understand the universe. It is, as we say on the show’s Web page touting the show, “a journey of epic proportions across space and time.”

It seems particularly appropriate to talk about it today, with the release of a new, more precise value for the Hubble Constant. That constant is one of the numbers astronomers use to determine the expansion rate of the universe.  Knowing that expansion rate helps us also determine other factors like the size of the universe and just how old the universe really is. But, the root of all this knowledge is cosmic distance.

Distance in the universe is important to understand, and it is measured by using “standard candles” in the darkness. The standard candles are usually specific types of supernova explosions and, in particular,  a type of pulsating star called a Cepheid variable.  These pulsate with a regular rhythm and they are found in every galaxy we’ve seen so far. You can use the observations of those candles to derive distances across the cosmos.

In Light Years from Andromeda, we focus on a distance that most people have heard of, even if they aren’t up on the latest in cosmology: the light-year. It’s the distance that light travels in a year at a speed of roughly 300,000 kilometers per second. We wanted to bring that figure into some kind of reality for people, so I decided to take them out to the Andromeda Galaxy, which lies some 2.5 million light-years away.  We begin the show there, some 2.5 million years ago, and we bring people back home to the Milky Way, across all that time and space at the speed of light. Along the way we discuss human history set against that travel time. And, when we arrive at Earth, we learn about light-speed and the way that we can use light to measure cosmic distances.  It’s really a simple concept and a simple story to tell. And, it’s been very satisfying to see the show come to life in the new fulldome medium, where we really CAN fly from one galaxy to another and take in the breathtaking beauty of the cosmos.  And, to have it come out now, when the precision of the Hubble Constant is even better than before — well, it just sends chills up my spine. These are the times that make my day as a science writer!

(Check out the trailer for the show below.)

Light Years from Andromeda trailer

'Casts, fulldome, new media, Planetarium, Planetarium-related

New Media and Domes

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Dome Content Delivery is Changing

One of the areas where “new media” and the digital age are making a big change is in the domed theater — more commonly known as the planetarium theater — where astronomy and space science have always reigned. I’ve worked in the creation of fulldome/planetarium content for a number of years. And, I have written about this change before. Part of it is fueled by changes in technology. Today we can put stuff up on the dome using video projection systems and opto-mechanical planetarium projectors in combination or apart from each other. Imagery is available to us digitally and it doesn’t have to be made into film-based media to be delivered. In a few years’ time, the classic slide-film-based way of doing things could well be obsolete — although it is, to quote the old Monty Python line, “not dead yet.”

There is a lot of discussion in the planetarium/fulldome video world about how the new technology is going to influence (or is influencing) the content. It’s a fair question, and I think there are several answers you could supply. One is that the dome is still being used to teach astronomy, to bring the wonders of the universe to mass audiences. In that case the delivery system doesn’t really matter. You CAN do it with slides and a live lecturer, PowerPoint (in the dome?), or video delivery systems. The story is the story is the story.

If you posit that the dome is an immersive medium as well, you can still do immersivity with slides, which is what we’ve done for years, but it looks better when you use video to “paint” your dome. However, lovely immersive visualizations are incomplete without a story, no matter how they’re delivered.

You could say that the content of fulldome can be anything — from an exploration of the universe at large to a trip through the human body or an exploration of the microworld (atoms, molecules, quarks, etc.).  You can still do that with slides, although much better to be done through video.  Still depends on telling a good story.

I think you can see where this is going.  Like all other forms of media (new, old, really old, really new), the content — the story you want to tell is what’s going to carry the day.  The delivery system is important, and in the dome, the trend is toward fulldome video presentations.  That’s the wave of the future, but in one sense, the fundamentals remain strong — the story is paramount.