A Planetarium Show!

We had a real treat tonight for our astronomy club meeting.  This is a photograph of the star projector in the planetarium in the foreground, with members and guests sitting in the background.  We had a huge turnout of members and visitors.  We listed the talk on our club website, and a number of visitors came to hear the talk, and it was free.

Dave Bush, the planetarium director, gave an informal talk, starting with a brief history of the planetarium.  Then he darkened the dome and the star projector, seen behind him in the photograph above, projected thousands of stars on the dome in a completely dark planetarium.  It looked like the night sky would look from a really dark part of the United States and he pointed out the Moon and the different constellatons and using the planetarium projector, he was able to take us anywhere in the world to see what the night sky would look like from there!

Here is a photograph of the night sky projected on  the dome with the round ball of the star projector shown in the bottom.  Even though these stars are artificially created with a projector, it feels so good to be under a black night sky and all the stars!