Requiem for a HeavyWeight

Requiem for a Heavyweight - HPA Blog Entry

Its an old Rod Serling title, he of Twilight Zone fame, and the TZ is where I've found myself in my first two planetarium visits in decades.    A grad school tour for my son to Chapel Hill found me in the Moorehead, which I came to realize was perhaps one of the big five of all time (all time!) in the US, the closest thing to Adler this old Chicago boy (62-68) was going to get without traveling to any coastal megacities.  Then I went to my idyllic middle of nowhere extreme western Kentucky Land Between the Lakes planetarium and something similar happened.

I didn't see any stars on either trip.   I saw cartoons.  Talking heads floating in space, bullying our sun.  I saw demoted Pluto hanging with his new mate Ceres, wondering why Jupiter and Saturn disowned him. Maybe Pluto can hook up with Gimli, since he's now a dwarf?  I saw skies that looked more like Van Gogh paintings than pinpoints of light.   The heavyweight Zeiss and the welterweight Spitz machines had been KOed by video. But nobody cared.  The kids didn't.  They weren't bound for the out of doors anyway, or if they were it was organized camp.  

Plenty of good information, too much really in both shows.  I found the talking star who was getting ready to explode even sadder than she was depicted - she was about to give birth to heavier elements (naturally it had to be a she didn't it), as if stars have genders - why would that make any star sad?

Kids clapped, they learned, on to the next digital time byte.  Its keeping alive the planetariums.  I tried to watch the video of the Moorehead Zeiss (youtube) .. pieces of it anyway, being carried into the office but I choked up.  Requiem for a Heavyweight.   I don't think anyone even knows where it went.  There's treasure hunters out there right now looking for classic planetarium machines.  Nobody knows where they went!

Its all good.   I reserve the right to be a little sad though, like that exploding star.   As for me, in memory of the heavyweights, the welterweights, I'll keep punching with home planetariums.   And try to keep moving. 

Nobody's going to knock me out.  At least that's the plan.

Why a Philosophy?

I qualified my Planetarium book as a Philosophy and Practice because for everything I built in the way of home planetariums, the BUILDING was but the tip of this enormous iceberg of THOUGHT.  Indeed, I could soak in the idea of planetariums in my house long before I knew how to achieve them.  Therefore, a kind of philosophy developed to explain WHY I wanted to do this.   Take other pursuits, this may not be that unusual.  Say you love to go fishing.   The philosophy behind fishing is what ..   its totally removed from everyday life..   its not necessarily goal oriented - most of the fishing I did with my father growing up was not about catching fish - we did it anyway, because its what we DID.  It was a way of life.  I grew up expecting to go fishing on vacation .  We had a boat.  I couldnt imagine NOT having a boat.   Fishing wasnt just an activity. It was a philosophy.  Now I'm pretty sure my dad never once thought of it this way, and maybe neither did I at the time.  But now from the perspective of growing up and looking back over the decades to my youth, I can gradually see the overall shape of the activity.  Actually sitting in a boat wasnt all of it.  It wasnt even the best part.   The idea behind it was the thing.  

Home Planetariums evolved a philosophy for me.  It would take years of actually fishing, actually making them, before I could see the philosophy at work behind them.  But it was there.  Like the dark between the stars, it was everywhere!

Building a planetarium - the philosophy and practice

Lets imagine a world where the stars shine no more, you and I.  Its not so hard to do really, we are already well on the way to just such a place.  City lights, urban sprawl, digital motion pictures with CGI, anythings possible and we've already seen everything.  Who needs the stars?  My phone will navigate, theres no need for a North Star.   Greek mythology?  Google it.  Youtube is chockful of Hubble photographs, I can drive round Mars in the latest rover, I can probably go golfing with Albert Einstein.  The stars shine no more for a couple reasons ..  one, you couldn't see them even if you tried.  And two, nobody wants to try anyway.

But then lets imagine one day our curiosity gets the better of us.  Maybe we read of some starry nights in a romance novel.  Maybe we're studying history and we see an old painting of Magellan's ships under something called a Southern Cross, with two misty patches below it in the sky.  Maybe grandma tells of camping wayyy back and sitting round a campfire telling legends about Dippers and a Lady in a Chair, and all sorts of crazy images like that.    And we WANT to see the stars.  But not on the screen, in the sky.

But the real sky doesnt have them anymore.  Its washed with light.  Uninspiring.  We could wait till maybe that trip to the country next summer - try to see the stars then?   But then an idea hits us.   A crazy idea.  There are machines ... USED to be machines rather ..  that projected the stars in all their glory and splendor on a domed ceiling.  People would go - often in cities but in schools too ..  and see the stars as they used to be seen.  They were fantastic machines.  And fantastic theaters.  But didn't we go to one in our nearby city last summer?  It was cool, there were movies and magic treehouses and astronauts.  But nothing took our breath away.  Thats getting almost impossible to do anyway.

But these places and these machines both had the same name.  They were called P L A N E T A R I U M S.   A long word, and a complicated concept.  But such a simple, beautiful result .  the stars!  And they looked real.

So we thought, could we BUILD that, since nobody has them anymore?  What would it take?  And what kind of attitude, philosophy even, would it require of us?

Thats the subject of this book.   Building Planetariums.  At Home.  Both a philosophy and a practice.  Why?  Because of a profound belief that YES, YOU NEED ONE AT YOUR HOUSE!