![]() ![]() He was walking through the American Museum of Natural History one day when he came upon a man who was working on a set of plans. He went to public schools, he went to MIT, started his financial career in Boston and then moved down to New York City. KENNETH MERIN (President, The Charles Hayden Foundation): Charles Hayden grew up in Boston. A New York financier, Charles Hayden, was visiting Chicago. TYSON: And of course, that was equipped with the new mechanical-optical projector that had just been invented a few years earlier. As well-known as the Hayden Planetarium is here in New York City, it was not the first planetarium in the country.ĬOLIN DAVEY (Author/Historian): The Adler Planetarium was the first American planetarium. TYSON: It was most people’s first introduction to what’s actually going on in the night sky. The Carl Zeiss company invents a mechanical-optical projector and it transformed the field. This is something that puts stars completely on a dome that surrounds you.ĬARTER EMMART (Director of Astrovisualization, Hayden Planetarium): You have essentially a bright light in the middle of a sphere. The sphere has lenses to focus, star plates, it divides the sky up into patches. The planets, because they move back and forth across the sky, had to be independently controlled with their own motors. The expanding universe is discovered by Edwin Hubble. A watershed decade in science in general, but especially for planetariums. TYSON: It would take until the 1920s for somebody to figure out that there’s another way to show what the planets are doing. Why not have a planetarium be a thing that represents not only the solar system, but all of what we might know in the universe? How about all the stars of the night sky? The 1920s, quantum physics is discovered. SWEITZER: I firmly believe that all of these devices, they’re intended to model the universe on one hand, but on the other hand, they’re displays of the latest, greatest tech. RAPOSO: A properly built orrery will show you the planetary motions at their correct orbital rates. You turn it and the planets move around the Sun-centric model. TYSON: You have these things called orreries. RAPOSO: And what you see is that devices that were previously used to simulate and recreate the planetary motions according to the old Earth-centric astronomy, these gradually morph into devices that show you the motions of the planets around the Sun. And so the proper way to visualize that is with an armillary. JAMES SWEITZER (Former Project Director, Hayden Planetarium/Rose Center): And in that model of the universe, the Earth is at the center. PEDRO RAPOSO (Curator/Director of Collections, Adler Planetarium): The planetarium has a long history that goes back to antiquity. In the Middle Ages, we start having astronomical clocks in cathedrals. TYSON: That’s not what it always was. You go back one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, the word planetarium represented any device that showed you what the planets did. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (Director, Hayden Planetarium): I’m an astrophysicist today because of a first encounter with a planetarium.įAHERTY: The classic way people mostly think about planetariums is this gorgeous nighttime sky that’s projected into a dome. MARTHA GILMORE (Planetary Geologist, Wesleyan University): I wanted to become a scientist because of the Planetarium. JACQUELINE FAHERTY (Astrophysicist, Hayden Planetarium): My life really began when I walked into the Hayden Planetarium and I saw the sky in that theater and I absolutely fell in love. Stories in the Sky: A History of Planetariums - Transcript
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