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Fly me to the moon...: See how the planetarium has zoomed forward, in 100 years
It wasn’t easy, bringing the stars indoors. The first show, held in Germany in 1925, used grainy footage on a small dome, but was dizzying nonetheless. Now, a whole new future looms.
It’s 1925, and a small crowd has stepped into a pitch-black dome and heard the doors close behind them.
As they struggle to adjust to the darkness, the roof seems to disappear. An expanse of star-studded sky appears above them.
There are no models of ringed globes in this planetarium. No pinholes in the walls, with light shining through to mimic stars. Instead, there is a hub in the centre of the room, throwing out imagery of a dazzling night sky.
“It matters not whether the audience be made up of children or adults, professional people or laymen, the emotional experience is always the same,” astronomer George Clyde Fisher wrote, in an essay in the journal Popular Astronomy. “When… the stars are ‘turned on,’ the audience gasps audibly… No one is prepared for anything so realistic and so dramatic.”
Today’s planetariums map swirling galaxies, zoom through clouds of asteroids, and add imagery of real meteors as they approach. We’ll get to some of those in a bit. First, a look at why things changed, 100 years ago.
It all began with a German electrical engineer named Oskar von Miller, in 1913.
von Miller was a busy man. Amid the race for electrification (which picked up pace in the 1880s), he had helped electrify major German cities. A passionate educator, he helped set up the Deutsches Museum in Munich in 1903, a rare institute dedicated to the history of science and technology, and served as its first director.
A decade on, artificial light and rising pollution levels had started to blot out the night sky. In an era of great strides for science, von Miller wondered, was there something he could do to bring people closer to the stars?
He reached out to the optics factory Carl Zeiss, makers of some of the world’s best optical instruments since the 1840s. Could they make a machine that could project, indoors, real imagery of the night sky?
A year after they said they could, World War 1 broke out. The project was delayed. It would be 1923 before the first demonstrations; 1925 before the display at the Munich museum opened to the public.
It was the scientists at Zeiss who came up with the idea of the hemispheric dome.
Inside, a projector called the Zeiss Mark I threw out images of 4,500 stars and the Moon as seen from Earth; as well as representations of the planets in the solar system, of constellations and of the Milky Way.
Within a year, another Zeiss-equipped planetarium opened, near the company headquarters in the city of Jena (where it still runs, with highly updated imagery).
The “Wonder of Jena” drew crowds who had to be cautioned that the spectacle they were about to see could be dizzying. It was quite literally like nothing the world had seen before.
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The planetarium remains the closest that most humans will ever get to the stars.
Who hasn’t dreamed of being an astronaut and jettisoning off Earth, as Tanya Hill, senior curator at the Melbourne Planetarium, puts it. “In the planetarium, I can get an idea of what it would feel like,” she adds.
As word spread of what von Miller and Zeiss had pulled off in Germany, a race of sorts began.
By 1930, the Adler Planetarium had been set up in Chicago, by the businessman and philanthropist Max Adler. It was powered by the Zeiss Mark II, which allowed for even more complicated movements by the moon and planets. By 1935, Italy, Japan, Soviet Russia, Sweden, Belgium, France and Austria had planetariums too.
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Fast-forward half a century and we are now in the digital age.
By the 1980s, the computer graphics company Evans and Sutherland makes a major breakthrough. It launches Digistar: wraparound 3D shows with crystal-clear imagery, no breaks and no seams.
Planetariums, starting in the US and then around the world, start to redo their interiors to make the most of this experience. Domes are extended to reach almost to the ground; chairs are flattened out into recliners. The new shows are pitched as “immersive” journeys into space.
On the screen, the digital replica of the universe is now being continually refined and updated, using data from early interstellar probes such as Voyager and space satellites such as Explorer. By 1990, NASA (the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has set up its Scientific Visualisation Studio, which begins to collaborate with institutes such as planetariums, providing imagery and video content for outreach and educational purposes. Today, imagery based on data from the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope (built and operated jointly by NASA, the European Space Agency or ESA and the Canadian Space Agency) is thus making its way onto these screens too.
Digistar is still powering many of the experiences, offering planetariums around the world access to updated scientific data, 3D models and scripted shows.
The combination of giant screens, cutting-edge data and 3D modelling has in fact begun to send information the other way, resulting in new scientific discoveries too.
A show titled Encounters in the Milky Way, at the American Museum of Natural History’s cutting-edge Hayden Planetarium in New York City, for instance, zoomed so expertly into digitally simulated imagery of the Oort Cloud on its massive 68-ft-diameter dome that it updated scientists’ understanding of the mass itself, earlier this year.
This cloud of comet-like bodies of ice surrounds the solar system, and was originally thought to be spherical in shape. It turns out that the cloud is actually spiral, as a result of the pull of the Milky Way itself.
It was astrophysicist Jacqueline Faherty of the Hayden Planetarium who made the discovery, while reviewing the institute’s 3D model on the dome screen.
When planetary researcher David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, who had provided data for the model, reviewed it as well, he realised it was accurate. The spiral had been hiding in his data all along. Nesvorny went on to publish a scientific paper on the Oort Cloud’s shape in The Astrophysical Journal in April.
“The discovery was certainly enabled by wanting to see the latest data on our biggest screen, for the general public,” Faherty says.
This points to a possible new future for planetariums too, as spaces where footage of the body; or of elements of space technology, biology and science can be engaged with in new ways, by researchers and laypeople alike.
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Interestingly, the pace of astronomical discovery can make running a planetarium quite challenging.
“Before ESA’s 2013 Gaia mission, which 3D-mapped parts of the Milky Way and concluded this year, we knew the 3D positions of about 100,000 stars. Now the number is more than 10,000 times that,” says Mark Subbarao, former director of the Adler Planetarium’s Space Visualization Laboratory and now head of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. “Big numbers like that tend to break the software, and you start having to use new tricks to keep up.”
The tricks may involve new software, new hardware, or new audience infrastructure.
The new frontiers in planetarium display may be 4D or even 5D projections, as visualisation in general moves from flat screens to holographic displays. “With hydraulic seats, vibrating floors and maybe a sudden sense of weightlessness from simulated zero gravity, we may eventually be able to experience a little bit of what spaceflight is like,” says astronomer Arvind Paranjpye, director of the Nehru Planetarium in Mumbai.
Already, as Faherty puts it, “the sense of being able to lift off from Earth and fly amongst the planets and stars has never been stronger.”
