Enabling Full-Dome Creativity

Every blog starts with that first post where you try and define yourself and the content you (and if you’re lucky, your team) is trying to produce. Here at “Science on the Half Sphere” we’re still working to define all the things we want to do, and we invite you on our journey.

Like everything here at CosmoQuest, we see ourselves as part a community that we want to support and grow. Our community consists of all you wonderful folks out there with planetariums large and small, built of bricks and built of canvas, constructed a 100 years ago and inflated for the first time 10 minutes ago – we’re part of the community of folks working to communicate science using domes. Our group is based out of the Ward Beecher Planetarium at Youngstown State University. We’re lucky enough to funding that allows us to provide our shows to the public for free, but our funding is finite, and sometimes its a struggle to find interesting content that fits our budget. In order to keep bringing the public new and interesting content we’ve started creating our own shows, augmenting our staff with creative student arts and programmers (who are sometimes the same person!), and collecting our own planetarium imagery with fish-eye cameras.

We’ve realized that sometimes the simplest imagery – a panorama at Mauna Kea or sunset at a star party – just isn’t available, and as we’ve worked to fill in the gaps in our own image and video libraries, we’ve made the decision to share our content with you through this site. It’s our hope that together we can work build a community of planetariums able to create a sharable content with the oh-so-right price tag of “please give me attribution.”

This isn’t a closed project. Do you have content to share? Let us know. We’ll either link to your site, or if needed, provide you hosting and a voice here. This is a place for open source, open science, open sharing. GetInvolved @ CosmoQuest (dot org)

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