A Brief Overview of the Home Planetarium Association

What does a flashlight bulb and 2 D batteries under a pin-pricked cake box have to do with a Zeiss Skymaster?  Worlds apart technology-wise, they both create something.  Something wonderful! Oddly, both these ‘technologies’ are now equally obsolete, but not everywhere.  At the Home Planetarium Association they proudly live on, side by side!   We just like stars.  And we like looking up in nature’s sky, but we can also create our own.  And we do.    We say,  yes,  you need one at your house.   

Begun in the early 90’s, HPA is an extremely loose confederation of old schoolers.  We never left the Adler in 1965 to put it in a nutshell - or any of the old star palaces, with their hushed back-lit galaxies and their charming horizon silhouettes.  We still read ‘Startlit Nights’ by Peltier, and if Orion was projected on our chest during some otherwise forgotten planetarium show of our youth, it was part of the fun.    But it’s a loose group because everyone brings their own passions to the table, and they vary widely.  Some build bigger cake boxes using pinhole projection, some restore old Minoltas and can tell you the differences between the Spitz A1 and the A2.  Some collect the fantastical space toys of long ago.  We’ve noticed everyone has their own ratio of interest - a sortof combined  Educator/Showman/Builder/Dreamer index.  For example, I’m about 20 percent educator, 20 percent showman, 20 percent builder, and 40 percent dreamer.  I chase those passions, memories, and in my recreated sky I relive everything I ever loved about the sky and write about it.  What’s your HPA ratio?

The pioneers who got me started were Steve Smith of Arizona and Dick Emmons of Ohio - both were building and showing stars in the 40’s and 50’s.  Enthralled with their exploits, I have drilled several star globes and cylinders used in my shows at Sumner Skies Planetarium, under a homebuilt 15 foot dome out back.  My primary projector is Steve Smith’s amazing 20 inch copper cylinder, which is not only an incredible projector, it’s a piece of folk art.  I was privileged to obtain one of Mr Emmon’s last hand drilled metal globes, and have since donated it to the Planetarium Museum in Big Bear Lake California - oh yes, theres a planetarium museum - an incredible collection I was thrilled to contribute to, a homebuilt ’cakebox’ sitting next to legendary commercial monsters of the midway.  

How many home planetarians are there?  Just a handful of home built planetariums in operation today are known to HPA, using old school projection.  The video revolution has charged ahead while we sit and wonder why our Aldeberan isn’t quite as bright as it should be!  Pinhole projection is easy - tiny bright light sources can be found at your local dollar store.  Domes are hard, and we call the period of struggle to build one ’dome purgatory’ only half in jest, but they can be built our of anything - umbrellas, parachutes, thin paneling, sheets, or as in my case waterproof insulation panels (waterproof because my dome leaks, which fits in nicely discussing the rainy season)  But HPA has a saying - For what is a dome really but an impossibly graceful construct of curved nothingness - it must be strong enough to hold up the bowl of night, yet it supports only the unfathomably tiny pressure of the myriad star points.   A dome’s job is to disappear anyway!  Nice work if you can get it. 

So HPA tries to do a little of all this and more - the subjects are endless.  Music.  Shows.  Special Effects.  We call anything that can be used in our skies ‘good junk’  HPA has an occasional newsletter that is in its 22nd issue, yet thinks nothing of taking a year or two off to pursue that Renwals Cosmorama I last saw at EJ Korvettes in 1962.  HPA’ers understand.  The stars are patient and so are we. Recreating infinity takes as long as it takes.   In summary, the Home Planetarium Association welcomes any aspect of old school planetariums, whether you build them, collect them, or just fondly remember them.   Its organic and really rests on just one central tenet - yes, you need one at your house!  

Lights in the Sky

Being a summarizer by nature, I find it hard to capture the essence of planetariums.   Lights in the sky is my latest attempt to bring a thousand points of thought and machinery and emotion and memory and science into four words.  And for all the phrases me and my esteemed friends with this passion have uttered over the years (and they have been eloquent and many), lights in the sky is my current favorite.  It all comes back to lights in the sky.

And why not - whether we swear by God or the Sun, physics or emotion, evolution or creation, its the lights in the sky that somehow begat us - that lead us - that move us.  We take lights in the sky for granted.  We study them, learn about them.  But how often do we celebrate them?  Certain holidays are on days of forgotten purpose, but our daylight saving lives are more and more contrived and less and less natural.  Who even would count how many lights there are these days in THEIR skies.

The sun surely.  The moon?  Ignored mostly.  Lightning yes.  Fireflies?  That profound random of fireflies are less enjoyed than manufactured glows of screens these days.  Rainbows, who rushes out to see them? Meteors, who is quick and determined enough to see them during their brief existence.  The aurora - what percentage of the people have seen the aurora.  There are more exotic, faint lights - you know what they are.  There are manufactured lights - far too many yet they are in the sky and we must acknowledge them too.

They are up there whether we see them or not.  Seeing them is the first step to perhaps a richer life experience, for after seeing them comes maybe, if we are lucky, feeling them.

I like learning about lights in the sky.   But I find it even better to let them seep into my being, becoming guideposts and lamps at the core of everything I have loved and will love here in this life. 

Education or Illusion?

WHY build a home planetarium is a question nobody but people who DO ask ..why for example have a spent as many hours doing this instead of bowling.  I've been the subject of three newspaper articles, and was never asked WHY.  People just do what they do.  So I ask myself though, being of a somewhat amateurish philosophical bent.   There are easy answers.  I want to teach astronomy, and inspire future generations is a slam dunk.   But if that were really my one driving passion, wouldn't I have become a teacher?  I didn't.  I like to build complicated things is a slam dunk - nothing compares with the wide range of things to build in this arcane pursuit - from the intricacies of a star projector to the structural nightmare of a dome, from the accuracy of realistic stars to the unfathomable logistics of a round backyard theater.  But if that were my driving passion, I'd build other things and be somewhat good at them.  I don't, and I'm not.  So WHY?   Theres something about the illusion a planetarium creates.  Something that resonates deeply back far far into my past I think is WHY.  I havent yet figured it out and may never do so - but somehow sitting in my own planetarium brings back long ago summer nights - trips to places - it just reminds me of so much that I loved growing up (he ended lamely) .    And I think that sharing this - sure I want to feel some pride in building something convincing - I want to teach some things and inspire some people for the future. But mostly probably its that old - I wish you could feel what I feel when I see this.  A desire to share that illusion, that wistful elusive feeling.  Thats probably the main reason WHY I built a planetarium. 

Floored!

Consider the poor floor.  I always liked floors you could look at for entertainment - the carpet in my place of employment looks as if late Pleistocene dinosaurs used it for birthing (you dumped your coke here in what, 1974? oh 75) .  sorry if you cant unsee that .   but hardwood floors .. sublime!  Tile, elegant.  Plank, soft popular painted as in my old victorian farmhouse, rutted with the feet of history.  Creaking just slightly as good floors will sometimes.  I enjoy floors.  But the home planetarium floor - its an organic entity in itself.

I use carpet refugees from the house of course, and an amateur archeologist could discover layers from eras .. theres my sons carpet from grade school - down another layer or two, theres the lime green carpet in the dining room the day we first owned the house in 1985 and without a word, carried it out immediately.  But my planetarium floor is more than just rug-ology - its a living breathing space.   If it could talk !   It would complain about those drips ...   since my planetarium has had several roofs, they've shifted around but they've always been there.  My floor would request buckets to catch them like in that summer of 94 ..  It would recall the snake that got under said carpets and was later seen slithering down a wall joist..  My planetarium floor would stick out its tongue at my carpentry and its gaps - somehow leaves get in, and they are NOT all tracked in .. they blow in  .. from somewhere .  I believe leaves are shape shifters .. they teleport themselves into everything I own.   Look, there's TREES we said as we bought this country place.  I've been picking up sticks and raking leaves ever since.  The planetarium floor would complain on and on .... MAKE UP YOUR MIND which chairs you are using ....   wait, whats this church PEW...  this couch, wasn't that in the sunroom throughout the aughts??  Stop rearranging.   Stop dragging stepladders over me!   Stop changing dome materials, dropping paint, staples.   Did you know you dropped a lense over here 3 years ago?  You might want to put it back in the bag.  If you only knew. Which of course, you don't.  And on and on my planetarium floor would complain.

But that's not the whole story. It would beam in delight too.  It would lovingly recall the footsteps of children, excited children, cautiously entering and then sitting on it.  It would hear the gasps as the stars came out. It would watch my stars on the ceiling and wonder how many floors get to see stars anyway, floorhood being primarily an indoor profession.   And it, I hope, would commune with the very ground it rested upon - recalling the years before the planetarium when I mowed its lush grass .. and the decades before that, when cows grazed upon it .. and back and back it would go sharing stories with the ground that supported it.  Back into forests and times that can live only in our imaginations.

Imagination.  That's what really my planetarium floor supports.  Thats where my stars came from.  We're both literally 'grounded' in both reality and imagination.   The next time I walk across that floor I'll try to remember all this.   As I shift a bucket, looking for that next leak.  

When A Plan Comes Together

'Plan' might be a retrospective, rescuing word really - did I have a PLAN for the tortuous, crooked path I've taken in home planetariums that in several ways culminated in last night's show?  More like a vague dream of long vanished childhood windows, a bemused preteenager under O'Hares flightpath peering up into the suburban Chicago night sky through a telescope without a finder (a telescope on a telescope?)   A somewhat outlandish youth, but then we all were back then with our Edmund catalogs, Erector sets, Heathkits .. we built things at Scouts, we built things in the basement .   we took old cake boxes from Topps across North Avenue and built bedroom planetariums.  I see stars I once exclaimed.   And today I still want to see more.  More stars.

Finally last night both my theaters worked in tandem as dreamt up some time ago - many revelations ago to be exact, that I couldn't build a planetarium itself big enough to hold groups of people all at once.  I couldnt cover science and history and modeling and music and constellations and cosmology and comets and castles and starlit villages and pyramids and Titanics .. just by looking at stars.  So blessed with not only a barn but the stubborn desire to put up buildings BEHIND said barn, to first lean them to it (lean-toos are very American I once told a bemused regional planetarium group in a ballroom in Cleveland), and then stand them up behind THOSE with four by fours sunk as far into the earth as a post hole digger and I could muster.  But I wanted adults, and I wanted children, and I wanted groups of all types .   and I've had them, Rangers, religious groups, scouts, home schoolers, the idle curious.  So not one theater would do - make it two - no wait make it three.  I've got a barn.  I'm crazy.  A little.

So last night a group came down from another State, had a picnic in a nearby park, and rolled into the driveway, 4 cars strong, the last one missing the driveway twice before finally being flagged in like some errant plane at an airport.  There were oldsters, youngsters, about 20 in all.  Not in a school bus like last time - not in suburbans and escalades like last year, but down from another STATE because, their leader said, he had fond memories of attending a large planetarium in his youth, had got on the internet, and found my little outdated site and emailed me.   There was a twist, they were bible based, offered (and accepted!) to send me some 'gospel in the stars' books which I ingested and added to my modest repertoire - without going into spirituality in specifics here, suffice to say that many infuse spirituality into the stars.  I am a STAR guy I explained at the outset.  I dabble in the other sciences and arts, but only a passion just to SEE them leads a person to take a patch of former pasture and raise up what surely is some kind of homemade temple to seeing stars.  Whatever your spirituality or lack thereof, that resonates I think with just about everyone.  Everyone has passions.   Mine are just in the barn.  

So as said for the first time we spent an hour in the Sumner Star theater - and talked about EVERYTHING .. the sun, the galaxy, why we make signs of the stars,  the great pyramid - the circumpolar imperishables.  The adults had sophisticated questions about how galaxies form .. the kids came up to touch the telescopes ... later they hit the childrens build a planetarium table I had set up at the last minute and played with Quaker Oats tubs, flashlights - wanting to know how to BUILD one...     I saw that long ago Chicago kid with his cakebox then .. and I knew somebody somewhere would continue the tradition of building one.  I talked about EVERYTHING .. and they wanted to know ..   how you built them ..  who used the old commercial starballs i had - about the toy ones on the market .    they wanted to see Khufu, the mummy in my pyramid - a small girl came up to me in the darkened field afterward and said - I like that mummy - do you want to play tag?.     

Then we spent an hour in the Sumner Skies planetarium itself, and I explained as best I could the utterly twisted path that had brought them, the first group to sit in there, into being.  How it had started out with failed domes.. then become a full dome accessed through a haunted house passage..  so black inside that a bat had lived there - a snake had been found beneath the carpet ..    and then a wall knocked out and a theater reborn into a half dome with extended audience area .. then last winter that half dome taken down and a new taller roof added, the backyard strewn with debris for months as I simulated a dome - they laughed at all my descriptions of the PROCESS - it was just as important as the stars themselves..  the stars were part of the story, but I was part of it too - making planetariums out of traffic barrels, going to Dollar Tree every day of my life coming up with things ..   they laughed when I gave the unofficial name of this dome, the doggie dome, named after the ferocious coon dog that had howled cross the fence at me through almost the entire construction period. 

They were fascinated with the stars in the theater ..  no special effects whatsoever. Just those stars.  They were fascinated with Steve Smiths copper cylinder - asking dozens of questions .. later in the darkened yard two men would PITCH ME an idea on how to build a dome ..   the thought of patrons proposing dome construction techniques blew me away ..   they told me how clear it was up in Kentucky from whence they hailed .. I joked I'd like to come see that - they may take me up on that who knows.  It is a dream of mine to own a tiny patch of land in dark skies..    We went down the Zodiac - the books they'd sent gave me that approach and it worked simply because it discussed constellations I had avoided my entire LIFE - Aquarius - Capricorn .. because we cannot see them from city skies we pretend they dont exist..   I felt like I had finally given a complete sky show - and we barely mentioned the Big Dipper ...  but they know Aries .. Virgo .. Coma ..     

When they finally left - and they paid me, I felt a stage in my planetarium career had been reached .. I might build more, I might not.  But I felt fully functional.  I learned things.   Dont have a rigid plan - you can plan for months and then throw it out the window as I did the moment you look up and see twenty people sitting in your building waiting to see what you've got.  Talk about EVERYTHING ..   but your stars and how you got them and WHY you got them to me is most important.  They will want to know.  These visitors did.  So whatever plan has come together - it didn't really come together the way I planned it.  It planned itself.  And I just followed along, that passion trail.  I'm glad I did.

Did You See Haleys Comet?

People where I work know I built a planetarium.  They just don't know what a planetarium IS exactly.  Since I work in retail, we periodically change the large vinyl displays which hang over the display cases, and I take the old ones home, reverse them, and use them in domes.  This material is oil base, provides a wonderful projection surface, is actually even weatherproof - I have a theory you could use it as roofing material.   

So people know - a couple of people who work where I do have attempted to mount expeditions out to SEE my planetarium, though none have gained significant momentum to actually arrive.  Part of that though has been my own lack of encouragement.  There is a certain tendency with home planetariums to want not want to indulge the mere idly curious public - to want to show this to people who have at least some scientific curiosity.  This may be snobbery, it may be insecurity - but I'd rather show kids the stars than just show people not really interested in astronomy things they wont understand.  This was perfectly demonstrated by a question I received from a co-worker yesterday..  she came up to me and as an aside asked me

did you see Haleys Comet last night in your aquarium?

Now I adored the question, in fact, that might make a great book title!   Before I knew how to answer she had walked off again, leading me to wonder if this was how little the general public actually knew about astronomy (Haleys comet hasnt been seen since 1986), and an aquarium may be home to Pieces, but Cetus certainly wouldnt fit) and particular planetariums.     So it seemed to demonstrate that mere curiosity seekers probably would only give my whole enterprise about five minutes of their attention before moving on to the next attraction.  I could be a cynical old man too.   But I did enjoy the question.

So the larger question is, should I use my creation as a mere 'sight' to be seen regardless of particular interest, or should I basically tamp down would be 'aquarium' visitors?   After all, I might forget to feed the fish ...

How I Taught Astro Physics - Part One

So for two days running, from 4 to 5 PM on a Monday and Tuesday, I taught astro-physics to two groups of Junior Rangers in an old barn.   Using somebody's old discarded Sears slide projector, showing selected slides a guy in Arizona sold me from the 70s.  Pointing at homemade exhibits that included a sun model made out of metal tractor wheel on an electric fan stand, a galaxy painted on a gas company wooden spool top, a walmart umbrella with an earth globe stuck on the handle, and some homemade pyramids.  I had just built my fourth planetarium theater out back, but I couldnt use it.  So this is what resulted.  And it was good.

There were philisophical questions.  A nature group like this being shown hydrogen fusion?  Don't they just want to know where the North Star is for night hikes?   They left it up to me - this was reputed to be a planetarium, but nobody knew what that really WAS, so it could be anything I decided it was to show them.  That kind of blank canvass can be daunting, requiring really some self examination.  OK, they want to see what YOU want them to see.   What you can offer.   There are two ways to look at that really.  The first is, with no expectations and no admission fee, well, they get what they pay for.  I could turn on a TV with an hour video tape of Carl Sagan and they probably wouldnt mind.  It was just a field trip.  I could stand before them and just talk from memory.  I could dream up a workshop - connect the dot star maps.  Anything.  Once I realized that, it both removed any pressure I might have felt from the situation, but made me realized I was being given the chance to convey MY passion.   What drove ME.    What made ME do the things I have done, remember the things I have remembered, dream the things I have dreamed. 

And its like that when you build a planetarium.   People coming to you are blank slates expectation wise.  These are people who've seen every possible special effect in the movies, on their computer screens - theres no passion there anymore.   The passion has to come from within the presenter.  With the material that drives the presenter.  

And so - here was my opportunity - I had more passions than just pointing out constellations.  I LOVE that .. its why I was here.  But this .. THIS .. was a chance to do a little more ....

TO BE CONTINUED