30 Minutes of WOW

30 Minutes of WOW

The very good question was this: what should be on a planetarium website, be it professional, school, or home?

I'll use a phrase I hear alot from my teenager. What shouldnt be? EVERYTHING should be! But.. lets concentrate on two elephants in the living room we somehow seem to ignore by putting lampshades on their heads. The projector, and gasp.. the stars!

Its a very interesting question, and I couldnt agree more that pictures of the PROJECTORS are oft neglected. What we tend to forget is, people take technology for granted now. Everything comes from Best Buy as far as my teenager is concerned, and 'just get it' and 'hook it up'. Everybody today 'hooks it up', whether it be big screens or dates.

But we have a unique opportunity, and more so in that we deal with not only legacy technology (hows that for a cliche), we deal with things nobody has seen. We have one foot in the planetarium industry, and one foot in those 'build it yourself'' competitions you see on TV, 'rube goldberg' contraptions built on ingenuity, passion, and duct tape. But I've been to shows where the projector doesnt even emerge from its 'silo' until its dark. And rarely if EVER is it even mentioned. Hows a kid going to get interested if they dont hear about it?

But the stars are also no longer the stars alas. The only reason my ridiculously simply HPA website doesnt have star pictures yet is that I dont have a camera that takes them yet. I have longings other people dont have apparently, HPA does.. I want to compare Orions ... I want to discuss the relative merits of how Spitz's Geminii compares with Emmons Geminii - I want to have a Pleaidies competition - whos got the best? And at least one star picture ought to be on a planetarium website. We have all this bathwater, but we lose the baby. Why are the stars forgotten in planetariums? Why is the projector forgotten?

Because .. we somehow take both the foreground AND the background for granted, and seem to want only diversion, entertainment - 30 minutes of WOW and then on to the next gadget from Best Buy, or video on You Tube .

People want flash, they want pink, they want WOW.

I think today we are just looking in the wrong places.