THIS YEAR MARKS THE 100 YEAR anniversary of the invention of the modern planetarium. While that term has for centuries described any model used to map planetary bodies, in 1923 Germany, a team from the Carl Zeiss Company completed the first planetarium device using optical-mechanical light projected on a domed ceiling. They built a dome atop the national museum and opened to the public in 1925, giving way to rapid advancements over the next 100 years, arriving at the software-and-database-driven, time-and-space-bending digital wonder that is the modern planetarium.
Here in Bremerton, Digitalis Education Systems has become the leading global producer of affordable digital planetarium projection systems. They’ve been manufacturing those systems and portable, inflatable planetarium domes in the basement of the Pacific Avenue building–that was once Bremerton’s Fire Station 1–for more than a decade. Upstairs, there is a 6.1 meter (20-foot-tall by 20-foot-wide) 28-seat fixed dome that is home to a fully immersive map of the known universe…
After nearly three years in the dark, Digitalis re-opened the planetarium to the public on the last weekend of October. And while this story could likely be told exclusively using metaphorical slogans fit for inspirational posters hanging on a classroom wall… we’ll pick one and give the honors to one of Digitalis’ newest employees Izabella Chesney.
“The sky is not the limit…” she says!
Izabella walks us past the ticket counter, through a door around a dark corner and into the planetarium dome where Dave Cuomo, Digitalis Educational Specialist, is standing alone under a real-time digitally simulated sky. The sun’s out. It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday. And Dave has the power of time and space travel at his fingertips.
“We can set ourselves anywhere on the planet Earth, or actually anywhere on any planet, at any time, to see what the stars are like at that time and place,” Dave says. “So we’ll go ahead and let the sun set over there in the west…”
The simulated sun travels 12 hours across the sky in a matter of minutes as a simulated moon rises on the other side of the dome. The ceiling darkens. The stars come out. And we are immersed in the night sky.
Dave reigns in the time travel controls and stops us right around midnight. “And if you go out tonight and look up,” Dave says, pointing, “the moon will be about at its highest point and you’ll be able to see Jupiter and Saturn…”
We can also see Uranus inside of the dome although that planet is not visible to the human eye, Dave says, before directing our attention to one of the most well-known constellations that is visible to the human eye—Ursa Major. Translated from latin as ’The Great Bear,’ also known as The Big Dipper, Dave likes to refer to it as “The Headless Peg-Legged Dancing Pirate Lying On Its Side.”
He tells the legend of how Zeus whipped a couple of bears into the sky, swinging them by their tails, therby naming those constellations Ursa Major and Minor in ancient times. Then, he rotates the stars around us inside the dome to show the headless peg-legged pirate mnemonic device that he has conceived.
Dave’s having fun with this. Seems like he’s been doing this stuff for a long time.
He is a volunteer Solar System Ambassador for NASA. He contributes to the Seattle Astronomical Society. He’s been an education specialist with Digitalis since 2019. Before that, he was the planetarium supervisor at the Willard Smith Planetarium at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle for four-and-a-half years. Before that, he was an assistant coordinator of Space Gallery programs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He’s spent many, many hours creating planetarium programming.
And he’s wearing a sweet galaxy print button down shirt.
He aims the virtual telescope at one of the planets we were able to see with the naked eye from Earth and takes us in for a close up of Jupiter, revealing one of its moons casting a shadow on the planet’s surface as it transits in orbit. The moon is Io, Dave explains, training the telescope for a closer look, pointing out the evidence of active volcanoes that dot that moon’s surface. Io is the most volcanically active world that we know of, he says.
“That’s because it’s getting tugged on like silly putty by Jupiter’s gravity and the gravity of other moons,” he explains. “And look there… there’s a lake of molten sulfur.”
While that thought sinks in, Dave zooms out to show us the orbital patterns of Jupiter’s moons and illustrates the gravitational effects that are creating this volcanic phenomenon on Io. Then he takes things one step further and asks, “So… do you want to go there?”
“Well, duh!” the kid inside me screams.
“I always say planetariums are the world’s best classroom,” Digitalis Co-Founder and Director Of Education Karrie Berglund said, sitting next to me inside the planetarium. “People come in here, and even before we do anything, they are already kind of mesmerized, just immersed in it. And the fact that our projection starts so close to your head, it really gives the impression that you are in the real sky, or in the real world with the sky above you.”
Karrie never dreamed of becoming an astronaut when she was young. In fact, she didn’t even expect to be co-founder of a world-leading manufacturer of planetarium equipment. She’d actually gone to school to become a French teacher. Then, when she was 19 years old, she came to Seattle from her home in Western Connecticut to visit friends for a summer and stepped inside a planetarium for the first time.
Like many, she was mesmerized.
She would go on to work for many years at the Pacific Science Center’s ‘Science On Wheels’ outreach program, bringing portable planetariums and teaching at schools around the state. Later, she would oversee the science center’s on-site planetarium for a year, and, during that time, she would meet Digitalis co-founder Rob Spearman. The science center’s projection system at that time was called a Starball, Karrie describes, a big ball in the middle of the room with holes drilled into it where the light shined through and gears that would put the planets and the moon in the right position.
“It was a very complicated machine and parts were always breaking,” she remembers. “And Rob, with his background in software, asked if we’d thought about going digital. And I said, ‘Well, we’d love to…’ But, at that time, the cheapest option was about $250,000…”
So, in 2003, they ‘started the affordable digital planetarium revolution,’ as it reads on their company website. In 2011, they moved the operation into the former fire station in Bremerton and opened Pacific Planetarium to the public.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Dave has taken us for a stroll outside of our galaxy. You can see Andromeda off in the distance amidst a sea of black. It almost feels like some sort of science fiction movie as we zip through the arms of the Milky Way. But all these images have been rendered through actual astronomical research and culled through astronomical databases. On our way back to Earth, Dave swings by Pluto. Part of the image of the planet is blurred, he points out, while on other parts of the planet, the image is clear. That’s because there hasn’t yet been a mission that has orbited the dwarf planet to provide a complete picture.
Stay tuned for more as the Pacific Planetarium has hired a planetarium director and aims to resume regular programming for the public. // BILLMAN
CHECK IN WITH THE PACIFIC PLANETARIUM for more at pacificplanetarium.com and check in with the Ritchie Observatory on Bainbridge at bpastro.org
