[MUSIC]
My name is Dani LeBlanc.
I'm the Director of the Charles Hayden Planetarium here at the Museum of Science.
Science in Boston.
I've always had an interest in the concepts of astronomy.
I've always been interested in who we are as humans, how we fit into the universe.
How we know what we know about the universe.
And I realized somewhere in my educational career that it wasn't the research
that was getting me excited about astronomy.
It was really about the concepts and
conveying that excitement to the people around me
[MUSIC].
So this is our main interface.
We use this every day for our shows with school groups and for
shows at the public that involve a live presenter.
I have controls over the planets and the moons and the different things that we're
seeing around those, you know different ways to see the Earth from space,
different things we can do with mercury, different things with Venus,
a whole lot that we can do with Mars because Mars is a very popular choice.
So we built those out a little bit.
And then I have this button,
which loads the universe, which looks a little bit like that.
We make the most densely packed areas of galaxies red, less dense becomes yellow,
and then the filaments of galaxies and the strings of galaxies become blue, and
then we see this Spider web structure which we called the cosmic web.
Astronomy has changed tremendously even in just the last 20 years.
We've learned about black holes, the skill of the universe, gravity waves.
All of these are just new developments, so helping people find the connections of
this very, very Intangible concepts,
I think it's really important.
[MUSIC]
We have many many different things that we do here in the planetarium,
we present shows, we produce shows, we really have a very full schedule.
[MUSIC]
Among our team of nine full time staff, we have media producers, content creators
visualizes astronomy educators, everybody's a little bit of everything and
everybody kind of learns from everybody else.
And I sort of over-see all of that.
The feature films that we show here, most of them are developed entirely in house,
with the museum of science staff.
Destination Mars is a show that explores what NASA and
its partners are doing to get humans back to the moon, and eventually back to Mars.
Together we all work on the scripts,
we create the visuals Here's the Mars base that we mocked up.
So, the astronaut is here.
This red line is the camera path.
[MUSIC]
Because of this immersive space that we have, people can experience things
in a way more, I would say, personal way than they would on a flat screen.
In a way more invested way.
There's no other space like it, really, in the city of Boston.
So, we try to really maximize and capitalize on that fact.
We do all the things that you would expect from a planetarium and then at night,
we just do so much more.
>> Do you wanna be watching dragon up?
>> [APPLAUSE] >> The past few years,
we've been doing the summer experiments called Summer Thursdays.
And they are meant to push the medium, the space and our artists into areas that
they otherwise wouldn't go if we were just sticking to the traditional programming.
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We've done tons of live music, we have movies, we have gaming, we've done trivia,
we've done improv comedy.
Just last week we had a dance party exactly where we're standing.
And for the museum,
it actually brings a whole different kind of audience, adults, couples.
People looking for something to do on a Thursday night can come and
have a wildly different experience than what they could experience anywhere else.
And for our creative artists, they get to kind of play
with all of these different things that they just love to dabble in.
This is a really cool thing that was not possible in planetariums,
before digital technology happened.
[MUSIC]
I hope in the future that will continue to push what people's expectations are of
planetariums, that people will come here and continue to get excited about
the astronomy, but also get excited about the merging of art and
science And technology in our space.
It is sort of like a dream job.
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