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!

From Veneration to Verite

I watched with a somewhat strange mixture of emotions as a giant banner was draped from the roof over the side of the Moorehead Planetarium, Chapel Hill, NC. Several new shows were beginning the next day, the day I was to make my first commercial planetarium visit in over 30 years. The planetarium world I had left so long ago was etched firmly in my mind, and I wondered if I would find it still waiting for me so many years later. I had my doubts as I noticed Big Bird featured prominently on the banner. So I asked myself a question. Planetariums in the intervening years had become entertainment emporiums surely, but were visitors learning anything? I went to one of the oldest planetariums in the USA looking for veneration. Ivied walls, impossibly complex optical monsters defiantly shining forth their analog splendor. I craved the hushed corridors with dim backlit spiral arms gleaming in fondly remembered night of my own past. I was all 50's and 60's Adler, visiting the Moorehead in the summer of 2012. Looking for the past, veneration, I found verite, or the candid truth in planetariums today. I think both can live. I started with what was still there from my old cherished memories of planetariums gone by. The building, it was old and classic. The gift shop full of wonders. So far so good. Traveling into the dome itself gave that same breathless feeling - and the Moorehead had a BIG BIG dome - moreso, this was a surprise because unlike alot of planetariums, you could not see the dome from the outside. The dome was not tilted to my relief. Tilted domes were too much for me, a symbol of our faint arrogance to alter nature to suit OUR comfort. But the chairs were not round the chamber, but oriented in a semi circle, implying a clear 'stage' area. Gone was that quirky 'ballpark' feeling where different seats had different views. A depressing 'no bad seat in the house' feeling always comes over me, insanely. I grew up going to shows in arcane old theaters - ballparks with posts, odd corners - here there was no feeling of .. I HAVE to go back and get a seat next time off third base, these rightfield seats are just arent that good! Here was dull uniformity. to be continued But back to my question, did they learn anything? 'Theres the Big Dipper', shouted a young girl as we walked post-show down the sidewalk outside, pointing up at seven stars on the giant banner draped over the building. I had my answer.

Eccentric Pursuits Require Eccentric Pursuers

Eccentric Pursuits Require Eccentric Pursuers Whats more rare, eccentric pieces of art, or the people who appreciate them? Rare equipment, or someone who will seek it out, preserve or restore it, and make it available? After having spent much of my adult life pursuing and build Home Planetaria, it at last began dawning on me that I didn’t want to be the ghost in Hill House - whatever walked in Hill House, walked alone. I didn’t want to be, whoever built planetariums, built them alone. I know that’s the basis for the myriad clubs and now internet boards in existence for like ‘birds of a feather to flock together’ as they used to say. But eccentric stuff requires eccentric people. Maybe even, it’s the people that MAKE it eccentric to begin with. Somebody dreamed it up. It just didn’t appeal to enough people to become common or mainstream. Or its time in the mainstream was quickly superseded by advances that rendered the commonplace for a day the eccentric in a decade or two (think keypunch machine). So eccentric pursuits need eccentric pursuers, to MAKE them eccentric.

Its Out There - Somewhere Everything surely has strengths and weaknesses. You buy a car, you don’t love everything about it. You compromise right? Relationships in life are like that .. You take a few bad things to get the really good things. I love my new iphone but there are a few things …. I’d change. Well the same is true for star balls. Building a planetarium isn’t like a home theater it seems. There, you get the projector, the screen, the popcorn machine, ROLL THEM .. Its done. A home planetarium, at least the HPA way, not so much. After a few years I have 4 star balls rolling round the place. I didn’t set out to have four. I’d really like six. Give me time. But they aren’t all the same. Not all star balls are created equal. This isn’t marriage. We can have more than one partner. You need one you built. From scratch if you would be a HPAer. Maybe not a a main ball, but at least some tin cans or PVC should be lurking somewhere in the theater. The pros used to be this way, before the digital curse I MEAN revolution. Look at old IPS guides, they were using tin cans, slide projectors, aluminum foil. Not anymore. A lost and dying art. You need to have put in some time on one. Maybe you don’t use this one so much with an audience. But maybe once in awhile you do, and you talk about what you made more than the stars it produces. The old commercial balls. The hybrids, old ball new mounting. They will all excell in SOMETHING. And they will all be not so good at something. Maybe that Dodecahedron shows the southern stars so well . Maybe the Spitz A3P has a detailed Milky Way that you just cant build ever. Maybe the home cylinder you bought just has more stars because a guy in Arizona spent 2 years drilling them in. Maybe you can have a greatest cylinder hits show for a single group of people. You will surely be tempted to build multiple domes to house them. Hopefully you’ll come to your senses on that one! But you will see the good and the not so good in each. Some of those Orions don’t look real. This one has an amazing Big Dipper. That one, I can’t even see Scorpio. Keep building, collecting, tweaking. You still don’t have a really good Andromeda Nebula. But its out there.. Somewhere. ….

Dont Let the Purpose Dictate the Space!

Single use places used to seem romantic to me, but then I realized they spent most of their lives sitting empty. That NFL football stadium used 7 times a year. The bowling alley. Golf Course. Planetarium .. Wait - not here. Build a planetarium and what do you have? A big room where the stars can come out. But it doesn’t have to be that way. My planetarium is a listening room. I fly radio controlled helicopters in there. I sleep in there. I film videos in there. Its multipurpose. A single purpose, at the amateur level, should never dictate the space. The space should allow many many purposes.