Category Archives: Planetarium

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!

'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.