Science on the Half Sphere is an initiative to both develop and to distribute materials that will be useful for fulldome media, which is being used more often at planetaria worldwide. SotHS is a collaboration between faculty, staff and students at the Ward Beecher Planetarium (at Youngstown State University) and CosmoQuest. The goals of SotHS include providing free fulldome (images taken through a 180 degree fisheye lens, or images that have been appropriately ‘warped’ in a similar way) content that can be used by other planetaria with fulldome media systems. The initial products of this collaboration are the production of a 22 minute full dome show (called Cosmic Castaways) and the taking of full-dome images of telescopes at Mauna Kea (including the Gemini North Telescope — see below); it is our hope that both of these will be useful to many people! Both of these projects are the products of NSF grants to Dr. John Feldmeier (at YSU) and myself.
Interior view of the Gemini North Telescope
Please check the multimedia links at the right for all of these materials, or the links below. We certainly had fun making this material, and we certainly want people to be completely immersed! Telescopes are our window to the universe, and it is difficult at times to fully appreciate just how large these major observatories are. I like projecting a full dome image of the Gemini Observatory on our planetarium dome at the beginning of my lesson on telescopes.
Mauna Kea :
Images Timelapses/Video
The plan, of course, is to not stop with these images. We intend to continue to take new fulldome images and produce new fulldome shows that will be of interest to everyone! So please check back again..you never know what will be here next (curiously enough, neither do we! Such is the fun of discovery…)
Pat Durrell, on behalf of members of the SotHS team (John Feldmeier, Pamela Gay, Curt Spivey and Annie Wilson)
Astronomer and an Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Youngstown State University. I am also the Director of the Ward Beecher Planetarium. I study stars and star clusters in nearby galaxies, and use that information to understand galaxy formation and evolution. I am also interested in intracluster stars - stars that lie in the space between the galaxies
Visit prdurrell's Website[…] take another trip to Hawaii’s Maunakea, to improve on the still images and time lapses of our own Fulldome Maunakea project that is already part of Science on the Half Sphere. We are also looking forward to taking […]
Hello Brian; Sorry for the problem. I believe all of the links to the timelapses are working now. Please let us know if you are still having troubles!
Best Regards
Pat
Brian — fixed it! You should be able to download the timelapses now.
The previous e-mail should have read ‘I could not download’.
Sorry.
All of this looks great. Thanks for all of your work. My only problem was that I could download the time lapses of the Mauna Kea telescopes. There seems to be a broken link somewhere. Regardless, thanks for the still images.
Brian
D’oh! We’re looking into it and will fix the links shortly. – Nicole