![]() ![]() Some very talented artists-including David Porazzo, Donald Davis, and Lynette Cook-created panels representing the surface of the Moon or Mars, ancient Egypt, or Stonehenge, or some other scenario. A recording about one of the more sensational and popular topics of the day-UFOs-can be found here.Īt the time, Morrison Planetarium also used projected panoramas of artwork to enhance the illusion of being outside or somewhere else on Earth, or somewhere else in the Solar System. Five LPs were produced, and seeing how astronomical knowledge and production sensibilities have changed over time, they’re charmingly-outdated. They were sort of the equivalent of the current monthly Benjamin Dean Lectures, which really do feature voices of authority in the form of astronomers and NASA scientists giving talks to the public about their work. Bernhard, one of Morrison Planetarium’s lecturers, presumably providing a “voice of authority,” complete with dramatic-but-cheesy background music played on a Hammond organ. This series featured planetarium topics such as the Moon, Mars, or the search for life. ![]() After the stars appeared, the first thing many people saw was the lecturer’s arrow, a special projector that he (or she) used to point to various objects of interest.įor a short time, the Academy marketed a series of “planetarium-style” lectures that were recorded on the medium of the day: vinyl phonograph records. The several-minutes long transition to darkness gave audiences a chance to gracefully adapt to the darkness of the night sky, and it heightened visitors’ anticipation as they waited for the first stars, watching them gradually appear, one by one. We decided the technology needed to mature, and didn't consider a more reliable system until the late 1980s. ![]() They usually began with a gradual sunset in the west with some nice music, and ended with an uplifting sunrise in the east and a cheery "Good Morning!" (No matter what the real time was.) While an automation system was proudly touted at the Planetarium's opening, it was abandoned because it was great at turning things on, but not so good at turning them off. Morrison's sky shows were operated manually by a live lecturer who turned things on and off while speaking, so the job was often compared to being a DJ. Research has shown that the illusion of looking at distant stars in the sky is more convincing in domes larger than 50 feet across, so that size is typically used as the lower cutoff to define a “major” planetarium (although that doesn’t make the smaller domes any less important). as early as the 1930s, but they were made for smaller domes, and in planetariums, size matters: the larger the dome, the more realistic the projected sky looks because from the way your eyes focus, you instinctively have a rough idea of how far away something is. There were other projectors built in the U.S. Morrison Planetarium was the first American-made planetarium star projector for a large dome. ![]()
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