Dan Tell, Senior Planetarium Systems Support Engineer at Morrison Planetarium | 2018-01-25
Change can be scary. I think it can be especially scary to planetarians, in our small, insular industry, with a lot of traditions and loud voices. This isn’t to say there isn’t a lot of amazing experimentation and innovation, but, when we found it was time to update Morrison Planetarium’s school shows, those of us on the planetarium team revising them felt nervous. We were going down a route that felt like a total mix-up of all the school shows we’d done before, and we weren’t sure it was going to work.
Mark SubbaRao, Director of the Space Visualization Laboratory at the Adler Planetarium | 2017-12-20
The Adler Planetarium's Kavli Lectures had its fourth domecast event in November, adressing the question "Are we alone in the Universe?". This lecture was led by Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University. In this blogpost, Dr. Mark Subbarao talks about the vision behind the Kavli Lecture Series and the importance of globally connecting the planetarium community.
Sally Brummel, Planetarium Program Manager at Bell Museum of Natural History, University of Minnesota | 2016-10-18
The University of Minnesota Bell Museum of Natural History’s ExploraDome debuted 10 years ago and has since inspired over 180,000 students and other learners throughout Minnesota. Sally Brummel has been with the ExploraDome since the beginning and in this blog post shares with us her rewarding experience of presenting in the intimate setting of a portable dome.
Derek Demeter, Director at Emil Buehler Perpetual Trust Planetarium, Seminole State College of Florida | 2016-05-13
The planetarium has always been a gateway to astronomy, but I believe it has become more than that. The whole “the sky is the limit” just got a whole new meaning when it comes to the immersive classroom. In this blog I’ll show you why that is the case!
Johan Sköld, CEO at Sciss | 2016-04-05
One of Sciss’s challenges for this year has been to take a good look at the projector market in order to pick out the very best and high-quality standard projectors for our display configurations. Monitoring the projection market is something we as system integrators do continuously, and I’d like to share some thoughts with you on the current landscape. It’ll be some history, some present-day reporting, and some thoughts on the future.
Mark SubbaRao, Director of the Space Visualization Laboratory at the Adler Planetarium | 2016-02-04
The modern digital planetarium is a powerful data visualization facility. The visualization software Uniview lets you smoothly explore a tremendous array of datasets spanning an incredible range of physical scales, from high resolution maps of Mars to our deepest galaxy surveys. All of which, when used correctly, has great potential to amaze, inform, and most importantly inspire the planetarium going public. Still the opportunity is there to do much, much more.
Mike Murray, Astronomer and Planetarium Manager at Delta College Planetarium in Bay City, Michigan | 2015-12-18
Fulldome theaters vary widely in goals and level of activity depending on where they are located, the nature of their communities, and the resources available to them. Everyone wants to build a bigger audience but before you start thinking about strategies, the first critical step is to look at your "purpose for being". What are you about? What is your key message? How do you want to be defined by the community? Why should people care about you?
Dan Tell, Senior Planetarium Systems Support Engineer at Morrison Planetarium | 2015-11-06
For as long as I can remember I’ve liked maps. I’ve really, really liked maps. Somewhere along the way it certainly involves spending way too much time looking at the back pages of Dune and the Lord of the Rings, and led to many hours of my youth drawing my own maps of imagined planets in pre-adolescent science fiction world-building. For me, and hopefully audiences out there, maps are a really great way to represent data in the dome.
Dr. Jenny Shipway, Head of Education & Planetarium at Winchester Science Centre, UK | 2015-10-05
Winchester Science Centre and Planetarium delivers a mixed programme of live shows and fulldome films to approximately 100,000 visitors each year. Target audiences range from 4 year olds to adults, including public and schools, with most attendees visiting as family groups. It is important therefore to have different shows to serve these different groups, and also offer to offer variety to repeat visitors within a group to encourage re-visits.
Dr. Jonathan Fisher, Assistant Professor at NY Medical College & Founder of Neurodome | 2015-09-10
After audiences experience flying through caverns of the cranium, surveying the ridges and valleys of the surface of the cerebral cortex, and dancing among the anemone-like "enchanted loom" of connectivity in the brain, that is one of the top questions kids ask me.
Staffan Klashed, CEO at Sciss | 2015-08-14
My 4-year-old son googled for the first time the other week. We were going to Portugal and he was curious to see what it looked like there. He took my smartphone and managed to spell Portugal in the browser window. He was instantly rewarded with a map and nice photos of Praia de Marinha. He was learning, unbound by a particular time or a particular place and trigger by nothing but curiosity.
Cecilia Öhrner, Marketing Manager at Sciss | 2015-06-29
This summer, in the beginning of August, we are launching a new industry forum here in the form of a blog. The purpose is to spread the best-of-breed - knowledge, ideas and experiences from people with a broad variety of perspectives. The blog will mostly feature guest writers, to bring in perspectives from outside our own sphere.
