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.
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.
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