Date: June 29, 2010

Title: The Adler Planetarium Sky Theater at 80

Organization: The Adler Planetarium – www.adlerplanetarium.org
www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts

Description: The Adler Planetarium celebrated its 80th anniversary on May 12, 2010. Mark Webb and Katie Peterson take a look at the history of the country’s first planetarium and the impact the Adler’s Sky Theater has had over the years.

Bio: The Adler Planetarium — America’s First Planetarium — was founded in 1930 by Chicago business leader Max Adler. The museum is home to three full-size theaters, including the all-digital projection Definiti® Space Theater, the Sky Theater which utilizes a Zeiss optical projector, and the Universe 3D Theater. It is also home to one of the world’s most important antique instrument collections. The Adler is a recognized leader in science education, with a focus on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science.

Today’s sponsor: “Between the Hayabusa homecoming from Itokawa and the Rosetta flyby of asteroid Lutetia, 13 June until 10 July 2010, this episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored anonymously and dedicated to the memory of Annie Cameron, designer of the Tryphena Sun Wheel, Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, a project that remains to be started.”

Transcript:

Katie
Welcome to a special edition of the Adler Planetarium’s bi-weekly podcast, Adler Night and Day. The Adler Night and Day podcast provides listener’s with a glimpse of what can be seen in the night sky, as well as updates on recent solar weather and riveting conversation. For the 365 Days of Astronomy, we’ll be concentrating on the riveting conversation. Without further ado, I’m your host Katie, and today we’re joined by Mark Webb, the Theaters Manager here at the Adler Planetarium. Welcome, Mark.

Mark
Thanks, Katie… it’s great to be here.

Katie
(Laughs) Mark is usually the host of Adler Night and Day, so you might recognize him!

Mark
Oh! That’s right! I’m a guest on my own show!

Katie
Yes! It doesn’t get a lot cooler than that! Um, we’ve decided to flip the tables a bit, and make him a guest for this episode. We’ve recently celebrated our 80th anniversary here at Adler. And, we wanted to talk a little about the history of Adler, and specifically, in regard to theaters. Which makes Mark, in turn, the perfect guest.

Mark
Yes, the history department here at the Adler trusts me to discuss this subject, without their supervision.

Katie
We’ve gone rogue. So, Mark… Let’s go ahead and get started with a little bit of the history. So, who is Max Adler and why is the Planetarium named after him?

Mark
Well, It’s named after him because, actually it’s named after the Adler family. Um, but, Max Adler is the person who put up the money for the construction of the planetarium. Max Adler originally set out to be a professional musician. Um, he was a very good violin player. But like many musicians he needed a day job so he went to go work for his brother-in-law, who happened to have just bought a store from two other partners, Sears and Roebuck. And together, Julius Rosenwald and Max Adler built Sears Roebuck into the world’s largest store. So, by the time the 1920’s rolled around, Max Adler was an extremely wealthy man and he wanted to something nice for the city but the city already had a very vibrant music scene. We had an opera house, the symphony hall, and so-forth. And, so… they settled on building a planetarium. Which was something that wasn’t anywhere in this area.

Katie
In fact, the Adler calls itself the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere. Which is kind of a strange claim to make. Can you explain that a little bit.

Mark
Yah, it’s not usually something people claim, “oh, you know… this is the first swimming pool in the western hemisphere,” or something like that. Uh, it’s a little unusual. The reason for that is that… when I first start working here I thought, “Oh well, we must be like the second or third planetarium.” No, in fact, we’re the 17th planetarium in the world. The previous 16 were all in Europe. Mostly central Europe, around Germany, where the Zeiss planetarium projector was invented. Um, the reason we call ourselves the first planetarium in the western hemisphere is because, for all of the years since the space race, the late 50s and early 60s, the United States has really been leading in space exploration and planetarium education and so forth. The Adler is always sort of at the forefront of that group and that’s sort of what that acknowledges.

Katie

Now, so Chicago isn’t really special regarding the history of the Planetarium? We just happened to get on the bandwagon early?

Mark
Not really, actually it’s a little more interesting than that. I briefly mentioned the Zeiss planetarium projector, which makes all of this possible. Now in Chicago, prior to, well in 1913, a gentlemen who was the director of the Chicago Academy of the Sciences. Created this thing which he named after himself called the Atwood Sphere and it’s a gigantic sheet-metal ball, that has holes punched in it, that represent the locations of the stars. And light shines in from the outside. And when you’re inside the ball it looks like the stars at night. But, the whole ball turns around to represent the turning of the Earth, but it can’t really represent the planets accurately. So, ah, Atwood asked Walther Bauersfeld, who was an engineer, in Germany at the Zeiss corporation if he had any ideas of how that could be fixed. And Bauersfeld thought about it for a while and said, ‘well, why don’t you do the planets with projectors that you can move independently and just glued little dots of light on the stars. And then he thought about it a little more and said, well, why don’t you do the whole thing like that? And so, in 1925, in Jena, Germany, where the Zeiss corporation was located at that point and much of it still is today, it’s a very large corporation today. They built a prototype Zeiss I projector. That did that, it projected the stars and planets onto a domed ceiling. Um, shortly after that they created the Zeiss II, which is what the next 16 projectors, including the Adler’s, were… that next model.

Katie
And that was what was here right off the bat?

Mark
That was what was here in 1930 when we opened our doors.

Katie
So, speaking of 1930, Um, Adler did open it’s doors. What was that like? What was the public reaction to that?

Mark
You know it’s pretty interesting. I’ve been doing some studying about what the public thought about this at the time. I’ve been reading newspaper articles and so forth from the time. This was not considered an entertainment attraction the way that we might think of Omnimax or something like that. This was considered to be a scientific simulator. It is, in fact, an astronomy simulator. And people looked at it as a demonstration of a precision instrument, not a projector that made a show. And the Adler’s first director, Dr. Phillip Fox, very much took advantage of that and created a series of programs that used that to its best effect. It was just a here’s the night sky rolling across the ceiling. He used it to actually demonstrate astronomical concepts, much the way that we use digital scientific visualizations today.

Katie
So, that brings us up to today, and there’s some plans in the works… in regard to our Sky Theater.

Mark
Yes, but we can’t talk about them.

Katie
Huh?!

Mark
(Laughs)Yes, okay, we’ll give you a little preview, a little peak into it. Yes, Yes… it is 80 years after the opening of the Planetarium. We are undergoing the most major renovation of the space that we have done in that entire time. And what we are going to be doing, is in some sense, redefining the experience that you have. That original planetarium, the 1930 planetarium. And the one that we use today, are not really that different conceptually, in how that work. But that only shows you the sky as you can see it from the planet Earth, and that’s not at all how we’ve come to look at space anymore. Ordinary people, like you and I, realize that space is a 3-dimensional place and that we just happen to be on a planet that’s in space. And um, everything else is out there and that the Universe is this gigantic bubble of everything that surrounds us on all sides, not just above our heads.

Katie
I like to call it the “Gigantic bubble of Awesomeness!”

Mark
Yes, it is! It’s the most awesomest universe ever!

Katie
The Zeiss, while it’s pretty amazing, is a much flatter version of what we’ve come to know the universe as…

Mark
Yes, and we need to have technology that allows us to present what we know of the universe today, and we will be discovering about the universe in the next 80 years. And so it’s time for us to sort-of, retool our concept of how we do that and what we’re doing. Digital visualization technology is a major, major component of that. So, we’re not just limited to seeing the sky from the surface of the Earth. We can go out there and do anything we need to. We can see in other wavelengths, um, you know, compress time, compress 13 billion years into 90 seconds if we need to, all of those things.

Katie
Now, as far as, the world of planetariums go, our projector, the Zeiss projector that we currently have, which is from 1970…

Mark
It’s from 1970.

Katie
Oh! I got it right! 1970! So, it’s 40, well, we got it on the 40th anniversary, and now another 40 years, we’re re-doing it again, but what will happen to that projector?

Mark
Well, we are going to put it on display. Um, the uh, the collections department here at the Planetarium, rightly, correctly believes, in my opinion, that these instruments that are in everyday use today, like our Zeiss Mark VI from 1970, that in 50 and 100 years, these will be just as valuable and important as out 16th and 17th century astronomical instruments are to us today. And so we are going to be preserving and conserving these and putting them on public display. We already have the Atwood Sphere, that I talked about earlier, here on display here at the Adler. Um, we’re going to put the Zeiss Mark VI on display as well, along with some other things that we are in the process of talking to people about giving to us.

Katie
That is amazing! And, I think one of the neatest things about, for me, looking at the Zeiss, when I walk into the Sky Theater, is realizing, as a tool, over the last 40 years, how many people have learned something as a result of that instrument. And to be able to keep that and have it so that people can know what it did is in itself a pretty awesome little experience.

Mark
Yes, absolutely, and you know, there are people who remember their previous visit to the Planetarium, which may have been decades ago, and they want to see the thing that they sort of vaguely remember as being so special when they were here before…

Katie
It looks so Sci-fi!

Mark
I mean, ya! It’s a pretty cool object. It’s unlike any other thing you normally encounter. And I think it’s important to have that. There’s a nostalgia factor for now, and you know, 50 years from now, it will be a historical experience.

Katie
Well, thank you so much for joining us as guest!

Mark
It’s great! I hope to come back again!

Katie
How do you like that chair?!

Mark
It’s good, and I get to use the good microphone!

Katie
The good microphone… the guest microphone!

Well, I’d also like to thank our listeners from the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, to listen to full episodes of the Adler Night and Day podcast, please visit www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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