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.

A few months ago I was flying somewhere and reading a book on astronomy when the guy in the seat next to me took an interest in the subject. Eventually, as it always does when someone strikes up a conversation about stargazing, the topic of learning the stars as a kid came up. “I haven’t actually done anything with astronomy since I went to the planetarium on a high school field trip,” was his statement. Since I do a lot of stuff with planetarium facilities, I drew him out about his experiences and gained another data point about the importance of these ubiquitous facilities in our educational and recreational lives.

Planetaria ARE ubiquitous, but they are in some ways part of an endangered species. They pop up in waves and close down, maybe not quite so quickly. In the past few years the idea of the planetarium has been evolving. For most of us of a certain age, they were the funny round rooms with the “ant” in the middle — that we visited in museums and some well-equipped school districts. The Ant refers to the big opto-mechanical star projectors that still sits in the center of the room in many facilities and splashes stars out across the dome. Then folks started adding slide projectors and video systems, and now today’s star theaters are benefitting from the advent of the Internet, the Web, and all sorts of other technologies. And while some are opening up, others are closing. The planetarium facility — and its technologies are changing and improving while other dome technologies are fading away.

So, do you go to your local planetarium? What’s happening down at the star theater? Are these places relevant to today’s education and recreation? Those are the questions that run through my mind as I create shows and ponder the future of the medium. It’s a unique medium, one that many of us have spent years mastering. It’s certainly not like anything else in the entertainment/educational outreach world! From the simplest (yet most wowie) special effect of a night sky (stars alone) to the 3D technicolor space voyages some producers are turning out, a night at the planetarium is still one worth your time and effort!