Notes from the Director
 

The pictures above are of the summer construction of the common entrance to the Achatz Hall of Science and the Schouweiler Planetarium. The view of the new facade was taken during at the last few days of September.

You will experience this beautiful new interior space when you attend a planetarium show later this year. At this writing, the interior multi-use foyer/atrium still has many details to be completed, including the installation of a sound proof door as a new emergency planetarium exit. 

This summer was a busy time for your planetarium staff. Thank you for your patience during this time of change and improvement for the planetarium.

Following her graduation, Planetarium Educator, Rachel DeKold stayed around until July before leaving to start a new job in eastern Kentucky. Rachel made an exact tracing of one wall of the planetarium's black light zodiac mural. Her tracing will be used to recreate the black light wall mural after the installation of a new emergency exit door in the mural wall. The wall be repainted black and the mural relocated next to the door and repainted using Rachel's tracing.

We are expecting our new exit door installation to be completed sometime around the end of October. Restoration of the mural will probably stretch into the New Year, but will not affect our show schedules.

While the construction continued through the summer, planetarium technician, Chris Highlen and I worked on re-automating our shows. Earlier in the year, the planetarium installed new 'state of the art' video projection equipment and our shows had to be modified to take advantage of the new equipment. Regular visitors to the planetarium will notice two changes in the shows.

• Chris will no longer be standing through the entire show, manually simultaneously capping and  uncapping an old fuzzy image video projector, while starting and stopping a DVD player.

• Video clips will now come on and off automatically and be higher definition, with no fuzzy gray rectangle around them. You might not even realize some of our effects in the star filled dome are video projections.

At this writing in mid October, we have only one show left in our catalogue that needs to be optimized for the new video system. We hope to complete this process this fall before we start production on Star of Bethlehem 2009.

In addition to our new video projection capabilities, we are also excited about revising our most requested school and private group show, "A Solar System Adventure Tour ". This will be more of an undertaking than the optimizing of the video in our other shows. We will update the science content in the show and for the first time add some video images to the show. The new version of ASSAT will be up to date, and look better. However, "Ralph and Dennis" will still try to "eat their way around the Solar System" and we will still stop on the moon to learn about moon phases.

We hope to accomplish the revision of "A Solar System Adventure Tour " during our usual post holiday January hiatus. Groups booking ASSAT for late winter and spring can look forward to an updated and better looking show.

Space Shuttle Atlantis STS-129 is to roll to pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida on Wednesday, October 14. Atlantis is now scheduled for launch at 4:04 pm, November 12, for an 11-day mission to the International Space Station.

Catch all the action for the entire mission 24/7 in streaming video at www.nasa.gov and follow the prompts to NASATV. The links can be found at our Astro News & Links page. Atlantis STS-129 is one of the last 6 flights of the Space Shuttle or Space Transportation System before its retirement after STS-134 a little over a year from now. Our November public planetarium shows will feature updates on the STS-129 mission.

Finally, I have three sentences for those wondering about December 21, 2012 and the rumored disasters to come that day.

• Don't believe it!

• Don't send me any letters, emails, nor call the planetarium about this!

• Do go to your favorite full service bookstore of magazine stand and invest $5.99 in the November 2009 issues of Sky and Telescope magazine.

The feature article of the November issues of Sky and Telescope is titled: "The 2012 Doomsday Scare?" (What you need to know to set people straight.) There is also a link to Sky and Telescope's website on our Astro News & Links page.

Those of you my age may have already sensed a "familiar ring" to the 2012 disaster rumors.

Remember the Armageddon scenarios and books of the early 1970's? Remember the dreaded "Jupiter Effect" of the 1980's and all the horrible predictions that never happened? And who can forget the change of the millennia and horror of Y2K?

Come to think of it, perhaps there is something we should learn from these past "end of the world as we know it predictions" - invest now in disaster/doom prophecy publishing and movie ventures.

That's about it for now. Check in mid-November for new planetarium information, and new "Notes From the Director" and perhaps a new picture of two of the new foyer interior.

Alan Pareis, Planetarium Director