Welcome to the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium at the Liberty Science
Center, the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere.
Planetariums been around for almost a hundred years now, one striking thing
about modern-day planetariums is that being digital based we can focus on
the night sky but then take you deep into the cosmos anything you can imagine
you can actually do in a digital theater now. Obviously stem is crucial to
the world as a whole to this country particularly and also being in a region
where you don't naturally have a strong connection to the night sky we're
providing a service kids are seeing the Milky Way in here having never seen it
in many cases at any point in their lives until they walk in the door here.
We are true 8K which means any line you draw on the dome is eight thousand
pixels and that requires ten separate Christie Boxer Projectors in this case
all linked together to cover the dome and then it's driven by Evans and
Sutherlands Digistar 6 software program.
These are all Christie Boxers, six of them lined up here again lined up very carefully by
the system to overlap perfectly yeah so six in the back and four in the front
and then we have a over here a large insert projector much like you'd have in
a conventional movie theater to allow us to show movies in here if we decide to
ever show regular standard movies also used for things like PowerPoint during
lectures for example.
We closed in August of 2017 and soft
opened with movies on Thanksgiving weekend of that same year so less than
four months later which is a phenomenally rapid installation and then
we officially debuted in early December of 2017.
We have what's called a Chroma
Cove lighting system which literally has trillions of colors as possibilities it
can actually programmed right through our digistar system and so in theater in
general the visual effect the lighting effects are so crucial to the overall
experience so it's great to have a state of the art system that fully integrates
with the planetarium software system to produce all the various effects we have
in the theater. So this is the control panel for the Digitstar 6 that's a
specific software that runs the program very user-friendly the panel lays out
everything that you need to bring on effects during a program including the
music as well as video and still images a very helpful thing again with our
focus on live technology is that all of this content is also here in the iPad so
we can actually be on the landing or down in front of the audience and run
the whole show off of a simple iPad like this. We also have a laser light system
so in the back here we can also see our laser light system by AVI we're
currently packing them in with Laser beetles and we have a team that actually
creates laser shows right here on staff and so we can also create show specific
to our audience needs for example featuring the space music in our space
music laser show that we're developing for the Apollo 11 weekend on the 20th
and 21st of July. The planetarium fifty years ago in the days of Apollo or even
before Apollo was basically a star machine which did a wonderful job of
recreating the nighttime sky anywhere on Earth at any time supported by maybe one
or two old-style slide projectors and that was it and to
evolve from that to having all these resources now that are at our fingertips
has been a phenomenal evolution in education and entertainment over the
last 50 years.
Thank you for joining us at the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium at Liberty Science
Center we are open daily in the summertime with 10 shows a day wide
range of topics but we want to be all things to all people here in this
theater for the school children for our tourists and for our families as well so
please come and join us.