Behind the Dome — Transcript

[Music]
This is 16 Cigni, a star that resides 70 light-years from Earth. Light left that star in 1954, around the time that the original Maynard Jordan planetarium opened. Since that time, our view of the universe has expanded dramatically. But to understand how we got here and where we’re going, we have to go back to the Cold War and a time of turmoil here in the United States.

Today a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket. The reaction was one of astonishment and concern; for it was now known that a potential enemy was at least temporarily ahead in developing means for spacecraft.

In October of 1957, three years after the original Jordan Planetarium opened, is when Sputnik was launched. Shortly after that, we started to see a real boom in the building and operations of planetariums all over the United States. In fact, it led to a whole variety of planetariums being installed in schools, in universities. And in fact, during that time period, states had laws on the books where if you built a new middle school or high school, you had to either have a planetarium or a swimming pool because astronauts use both to train. Most of, of course, the original astronauts were military test pilots because they had to have that celestial navigation background. And the best place to teach them that was inside of a planetarium.

So following the Cold War era, and when a whole variety of these planetariums were built, of course, they became this major, you know, education and public outreach tool that we use today to teach astronomy, but also to teach other sciences.

We have a number of shows and demonstrations planned. The planetarium here will be used to give shows which will give the public an idea of what’s in the sky tonight. And at the end of the show, we have a very special laser program that’s being put together by a student here at the university.

So the original planetarium was in Wingate Hall starting in 1954, all the way up until about the end of 2013. We are the ninth university planetarium, of course, to open, and probably one of the first 20 or so in the United States as a whole. It’s named in honor of Maynard Jordan, who was a mathematics professor here at the University of Maine. He also is the first person to teach astronomy. So when the planetarium first opened, of course, it was able to show the night sky, but basically a Ptolemaic, in other words, a ground-based view only. So you’d only be able to see the stars that were visible to your unaided eye. Modern telescopes, of course, have revealed that there’s so many more stars, one being this 16 Cygni, which is a star that roughly the light started journeying to us about the time the original planetarium opened. That star wasn’t even known at that time. That facility included a Spitz A1 star projector. It could show roughly about 2,000 stars on the planetarium’s dome at the time.

So planetariums continue to add new technology. It started off by adding 35 millimeter slides and video clips. But we also built a whole variety of special effects projectors to simulate other types of phenomena, things like meteor showers or even aurora borealis or things of that nature. In 1983, they installed a Spitz Nova 373 projector, which greatly improved their star field.

And we were able to show a lot more stars, constellations, things of that nature.

And then around the year 2000, the first full dome projection planetarium came out. Moving away from the optomechanical projectors to the fully digital ones. It allowed us now to be able to show, again, things in three dimensions, not just a flat view of the sky, but also to have really stunning video effects. What it would be like to fly into a black hole or orbit a galaxy, fly out to an exoplanet system and exoplanets weren’t discovered until the 1990s. And a lot of that using real data sets. We started to show other content; Earth science, planetary science biology, chemistry. We saw the birth of laser light shows, having live music performances in them, doing live theater production.

And then in 2014, the new facility opened. An anonymous donor came forth and gave the bulk of the money for that. Emera at the time gave the remaining amount of money and then Emera recently changed to Versant, And so the building was renamed at that point. The planetarium in 2014 started off with a 4K projector, which is what we have today. So two video projectors that allow for 4K resolution driven by a cluster of computers that allow everything from real time astronomy all the way to being able to do playback of a variety of different formats. So the facility really has blossomed and bloomed into something that is a science visualization, but also there’s arts and culture, really a visualization theater of types.

The Maynard Jordan Planetarium and the Versant Power Astronomy Center have always been a cost recovery unit of the university. This means that basically, we generate all of our operational costs through our tickets and our gift shop sales and things like that. We’re always looking to generous donors to help us with moving the planetarium forward. And in fact, if it wasn’t for generous donors, we wouldn’t be here today.

So the Versant Power Astronomy Center, of course, includes the Maynard Jordan Planetarium.
But we also have two different observatories. So we have the historic Clark Observatory, which
we open up on Friday nights after our public shows for public viewing. We also use the Research Observatory as well, the Jordan Observatory, which has a 20-inch PlaneWave telescope that we use for astronomical research. Our overall mission is true to the original mission of the Maynard Jordan Planetarium, which is to inspire folks to explore their universe. In their universe, that means everything from the universe of space and, of course, astronomy and, you know, space flight all the way to the universe that might be inside the human body or underneath the sea.

So one of our big goals for the 70th anniversary is to plan for the next 70 years. We want to upgrade our technology to 8K, which is sort of the cutting edge of what planetariums can do today. Your donations will make it possible to keep the planetarium modernized and move us
into the future.

Thank you for considering making a donation to the Maynard Jordan Planetarium and the Versant Power Astronomy Center.