Sting and The Sun

A pair of too-cute-for-words moments from yesterday:

We’re running Peter and the Wolf right now, a laser show of the musical version narrated by Sting. After one showing of it, a kid, probably 10 or 11, stopped in front of the control room and looked in the window at me. He said, “Were you the guy that was talking during the show?”

I chuckled and said, “No, that wasn’t me, it was Sting.”

He said, “Who’s that?”

I said, “Sting, the musician, he was in a band called ‘The Police.*’”

He furrowed his brow, looked around the control room and asked, “Is he back there with you?”

*******

Later, after the star show, a little girl, not more than 4 years old probably, came back with her dad. She started to ask me something, but then got shy (which happens lots… I must be intimidating or goofy-looking or something–scratch that, I know I‘m goofy-looking). She looked up at her dad and he said, “Go ahead!”

I asked her if she had a question, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I was just wondering… What are all the stars’ jobs?”

It was one of those questions that sort of caught me off guard. Obviously, something in the show got it into her head that the stars have jobs, but getting the proper context from very young visitors can often be difficult, and I’m still not totally sure exactly what she meant by her question.

So, grasping for a teachable moment, I asked her if she knew that we have a star close to us here on Earth, and smartly (and cutely) she said, “It’s big and bright during the day–it’s the SUN!”

I told her that our sun has a very important job; it gives us heat and light, and also it’s so big that it holds our solar system together with its gravity.

Which then led into a heated philosophic debate over the strong vs. weak anthropic principle.

But seriously, a four year old understands what we mean when we say that the Sun’s job is to provide us with heat and light, but I would never put it that way to a visitor with the capability to get the real idea: the sun isn’t there because we need heat and light and gravity–we’re here because the Sun just happened to be providing heat and light and gravity.

I try not to anthropomorphize things when possible, but there are times you just can’t get around it in a museum setting.

*Nowadays touring under their alternate name, “Sting and the Other Guys.”

Happy New Year, Etc.

I hope you enjoyed your extra second of 2008, though personally I couldn’t wait until that jerkwater disappointment of a year was off the calendar for good.

Now we can look forward to the inauguration of a hopefully pro-science, pro-reality president that has the ability to bring our country honestly and actually into the 21^st Century.

I’m very optimistic about the coming year:

Firstly, I’m excited that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, as declared by the IAU, the IPS, UNESCO, and a handful of other important and noteworthy organizations. It’s the anniversary of a couple of pretty important events, not just in astronomy, but modern science as a whole, and planetaria, science centers, museums, astronomy clubs and the like, are celebrating with expanded programming meant to bring the cosmos home.

Unfortunately, the Blank Blank Planetarium hasn’t planned any extra programming, primarily because of monetary limitations, but if we get lucky and find some nice people willing to donate a significant chunk of grant money (and things are looking positive, but you really never can tell when it comes to grants), hopefully we can put together a pretty significant theater rehab that will definitely bring us up to industry standard, and maybe even a little ahead of the curve.

More details on that as they emerge.

On the personal front, my wife is pregnant, and just yesterday we (joyfully) learned that it’s another girl, continuing a tradition my maternal grandparents started (two girls: my mom and my aunt), and my aunt and uncle continued (two girls: my teenage cousins).

(I’m definitely going to have to do something to bring up the testosterone level in the house…)

Just before Xmas, my wife was laid off from her job, and there was much consternation.

Yesterday, my wife scored another job, and there was much rejoicing.

In a mixture of my personal and professional lives, I have some plans brewing that I’m positively atwitter over, and will continue to refine as they develop. One of them is a sort of harebrained idea for an industry-related social experiment that could either be really, really interesting, or fall flat without so much as a whimper. We’ll see.

As far as Bearable Skyglow is concerned, my hope is to continue to shape it into a non-traditional aerospace/media/museum blog. Remember, I Am Not An Astronomer™; if you want news about what’s happening in the night sky, there’s dozens of spots on the intartoobs that can give you the skinny better than I could ever manage (there’s a trio of them on the sidebar to the right–check them out and bookmark their RSSes, right now).

I will continue my dispatches of eclectic calendar and aerospace science factoids, and give more inside looks into the planetarium industry and non-profit museum life.

In the meantime, if you can, when you can, support your local planetarium and science center! If there’s ever a time when these kinds of not-for-profit instutitions need loyal and interested visitors, it’s now.

Happy New Year.

A holiday classic

Holy Gassy Giants, Batman

Woah…  uh, wow, ahhh, BUH.

This is outstandingly amazing.  And clever.  Philly P breaks it down (as he does best) for the non-technical:

They got a spectrum of the star and the planet at the same time, and then waited until the planet was behind the star and got a spectrum of just the star by its lonesome. By subtracting the star’s spectrum from the star+planet spectrum, they got the spectrum of just the planet itself.

Because I am Not an Astronomer (TM), I often tell people in my theater that astronomy is something that I really have to do my homework on, because there is literally new astronomy news every single day.  This is a perfect example of that.

I can only imagine that this technique will become more and more easy and prolific, and we’ll be learning lots of extra things about extrasolar planets in the very near future.

Holocrap, a holograph

Been a looooong week.  Still not very busy, hopefully it will start to pick up tomorrow.

Check it: the future of multimedia theater?

Watch the video.  Especially the part where the camera operator walks 180-degrees around the display.

This is freaking amazing.

A lot of kids in my queue will ask me as they’re filing in, “Is this 3D?”  My stock response is, “Yes, but not how you think.”  (An equal number of kids and adults ask where they pick up their glasses… *sigh*  I’m always amazed by the number of grown adults that have literally no clue what a planetarium is.)

Technically all planetarium shows are 3D–real, actual 3D–because the images are being projected on a three-dimensional shape (a hemispherical dome) instead of a flat screen like a movie theater.  Well-crafted planetarium shows will give the viewer an extended sense of 3D: images and animations projected with subtle zooms and changes in perspective will appear to leap off the dome, and large panoramic images with proper hemispherical distortions will look convex instead of concave (important when you’re projecting lots of spherical things… like stars and planets).

The right kind of video projection systems can also shoot images with computer-driven 3D offsets, the ol’ skool red/blue standard, or the headache-inducing polarized stereoscopic images (seriously, we watched Creature from the Black Lagoon in my Sci-Fi and Horror Studies class in college, and it was linearly polarized 3D… I had a SPLITTING headache by the time it was over).  From what I understand, there are a handful of newer techniques that supposedly make a pretty decent 3D image, but they all need glasses, and having to handle the infrastructure to distribute, reclaim, and sanitize glasses is a huge hassle.  I think most planetarians stay away from it.

But this sort of burgeoning holographic stuff, which seems pretty straightforward and simple, could seriously make some fantastic effects in a planetarium.  Don’t let the low-resolution fool you; it hasn’t been that long ago that full-dome planetarium systems had relatively low-res outputs (for instance, Evans & Sutherland’s early full-dome video setup, DigistarII, shot monochromatic vector images; they’re on Digistar3 now and D4 is supposed to be hitting streets soon), and a lot has happened in 15-20 years.

Planetarium manufacturers are nothing if not clever and ambitious, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this sort of technology (among other really cool stuff) creeps into space theaters sooner than later.

And a quick nitpick: the popular use of 3D to mean “video images in three dimensions” is technically wrong…  Since time is a dimension, two dimensions of video (like on a TV) plus one dimension of time equals “3D.”  What people today think of as 3D movies really should be called “4D.”

Black Friday

Slow today, sadly.  Past Black Fridays have been the busiest day of the entire year, with full capacities for nearly all showtimes.

For my afternoon show, typically the busiest of any day, holiday, weekend or otherwise, I didn’t even make one-third of theater capacity.  It picked up a bit throughout the day, but I didn’t fill the theater for a single show.

I hope it’s not emblematic of a trend.

Turkey, etc.

MJ (and daddy) love Mama’s turkey.

Speaking of turkey, an oldie but goodie from snopes.com:

Turkey does contain tryptophan, an amino acid which is a natural sedative.  But tryptophan doesn’t act on the brain unless it is taken on an empty stomach with no protien present, and the amount gobbled even during a holiday feast is generally too small to have an appreciable effect.

…experts say the average serving of chicken or ground beef contains as much tryptophan as a serving of turkey does.

Regardless, we all took a nice long poultry-nap, and will go over to Meme’s soon for pumpkin pie.

Black Friday starts the holiday season at the Blank Blank Planetarium; I’ll be happy to shelve the shows we’ve been playing, since I’ve seen them both an estimated 400,000* times or so.

*Number severly exagerrated for effect.

Space Trip Inside of the Solar System

Still getting over this sickness junk.  I’m feeling much better, but have some sort of gunk in my throat making it difficult to breathe and eat, two of my favorite pastimes.

Normally I’m off on Mondays (it’s the museum curse–a Tuesday through Saturday schedule) but I went in today to meet Nick from Spectra Physics and Mark Z. from AVI to get the core and optics on my laser replaced.

My friends think it’s hilarious when something in the planetarium breaks, as I usually end up spouting off some Star-Trek-esque technobabble.  For instance, earlier this year when our star projector went south, I said to my friend Tony, “The infrared reticule sensor on the latitude axis control card blew a potentiometer, and it won’t zero out.”

Fancy words for, “It busted, bad.”

Luckily, the laser wasn’t busted, just drooping a bit on power, so Mark and Nick, two severly cool dudes, replaced the core and optics, and rebalanced the head so now I have nice pretty colors at retina-searing brightness gracing my dome once more.

Mark, who is an ol-skool laserist cat who rocked out Floyd and Zeppelin shows manually back in the day (I have it easy, I just load a couple of files and press play), was talking up Konica Minolta’s newish full-dome systems, which I didn’t know much about, so I came home and looked it up.

Peep the Super-MEDIAGLOBE, in all its minature kick-buttitude:

Projects 360-degree full-dome images AND filters 99.9% of particulates from your tap water.

That thing is a full-dome projector.  (It’s apparently bigger than it appears to be in this photograph.)  Leave it to the Japanese to build a machine that looks like it should sprout arms and a cutesy happy face, and walk around serving drinks.  It looks like you could pour dirty water in the top and get a pitcher of clean, clear H20 from a ergonomic tap neatly concealed behind a tiny trap door.

But seriously: 10,000 to 1 contrast.  Ten thousand to one.  That’s freaking amazing.  It’s all in the lens, apparently, and if there’s one thing Konica Minolta knows how to do, it’s make lenses.

Check out K-M’s planetarium info pages for some great examples of not-so-clean and clear English translation.  AVI does U.S. distribution for them, and there’s a good image of their user interface there.  Snazzy.  I’ll take one please.

The sound of me not speaking

Had a bad cold all week.  Voice almost totally gone this morning.

Probably didn’t help that thanks to a scheduling error, I had three back-to-back programs yesterday morning, and basically spent 10am to 1:30pm talking nonstop to elementary school visitors.

Luckily, today there was an extra staffperson that could cover my schedule, and so I ran a quick revision of the holiday show then cut out for half a comp day.  It’s nice to be able to do that, and even though our public shows are fully automated (except for the intro speil) I was happy to be able to come home and rest.

But it brings up an issue that I’ve gone back and forth on since getting into the planetarium field: how much of a planetarium program should be automated, and how much should be live, given by a presenter?

Doh!

Speaking of Endeavour…

Frankly, I’m surprised that this doesn’t happen more often:

Things didn’t go quite according to plan for astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during her spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday.

First, a grease gun inside her tool bag leaked, coating everything inside with a film of lubricant. While she was trying to clean it up in the absence of gravity, the whole bag floated away.

Of course it slipped out of her hands–it was coated in a film of NASA-grade lubricant!  Hope they don’t dock her pay.

Also funny:

Mission controllers were also tracking the lost bag, which they say is floating well clear of the station and drifting further away.

Sounds like a job they probably shrug off on the newbies.

“Cool, you work for NASA, what do you do?”

“I monitor and observe the orbital paths of tools dropped by astronauts.”

“…”