What were the challenges? One challenge with showing astronomy content is that the sky is very black. When you project onto the screen with the kind of large commercial video projectors we use, the background appears grey. That’s how stars look from a city, with light pollution – not the way we want to show them. This may not be a problem when pro- jecting onto a small conference screen, but it is an issue for a full dome theatre. So, we’ve used a newly invented
product supplied by Sky-Skan, which is basically a filter that’s placed over all our projectors to improve the contrast. This way, viewers see the darkest dark and the whitest white. When we switch to full col- our mode, such as when projecting a film of the Grand Canyon, it’s able to switch mode to enhance these colours too.
AM 2 2014 ©Cybertrek 2014
What about your content? At University Colorado, Boulder, we’re one of the leading astronomy depart- ments in the world, involved with the NASA missions and the missions to Mars, so we potentially have a lot of great con- tent we can draw on and develop. The university also has a film school,
so we’re able to tap into the talent of the students. They’re working on some unique content production for the facility. Currently, every show at Fiske is pre-
sented live with an astronomer giving a 30-minute presentation. We don’t just cover the stars, we’re also doing earth science – volcanoes and extreme weather, such as floods and tornadoes. We’re experimenting with using the dome screen as a backdrop to live stage theatre, rather than using a static set. The novelist Dava Sobel has produced
a stage adaptation of her novel A More Perfect Heaven that’s based on the life of the astronomer Copernicus. We’re also working with the Boulder Ensemble Theater Company to produce a show based on the discovery of “dark matter” by astronomer Vera Rubin.
Have visitor numbers grown? In Colorado, we have a resident pop- ulation of around 100,000. The old planetarium attracted around 25,000 to 30,000 visitors per year. Four months after opening, our income,
compared to the same period last year, had almost exactly doubled. That doesn’t exactly mean the visitors have doubled, as we have raised our prices by a few dollars per ticket (adult tickets now cost $10 (E7, £6) and children’s tickets $7 (E5, £4)). But it does mean that attendance
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