UW News

November 14, 2014

Portable planetarium takes astronomy to school

UW News

Students at Bellevue's Sammamish High School take turns giving presentations in the UW Astronomy Department's mobile planetarium. Last school year, 1,700 students sat for shows in the traveling dome, and about 100 of them -- form elementary school to high school -- gave planetarium presentations of their own.

Students at Bellevue’s Sammamish High School take turns giving presentations in the UW Astronomy Department’s mobile planetarium. Last school year, 1,700 students sat for shows in the traveling dome, and about 100 of them — from elementary school to high school — gave planetarium presentations of their own.Mary Levin

Planets and moons loomed over the high school students’ heads in the darkness: Mars rust-orange, Neptune an eerie blue, massive Jupiter with its pastel swirls and Saturn its icy rings.

The young researchers used Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope to travel the solar system virtually, swooping from planet to planet, past moons and through the asteroid belt. Checking notes by flashlight, they told what they had learned of these worlds — the thin atmosphere of Mars, Jupiter’s 400-year-old storm, the possible seas of methane on Saturn’s moon Titan, and more.

Astronomer Carl Sagan might have called this “a starship of the imagination.” But really, it was a sort of inflated tent, 10 feet high and 20 across, in the choir room of Bellevue’s Sammamish High School, on an evening in late October.

It was just another gig for the University of Washington Astronomy Department’s Mobile Planetarium.

More on UW planetariums

  • Do-it-yourself universe: Creators of the traveling planetarium have written a 12-page do-it-yourself guide, where they provide “advice we wish we had when starting this project from scratch.” Find it online here.
  • Volunteer or book a show: Interested in booking the traveling planetarium, or volunteering? Contact Oliver Fraser at ojf@uw.edu.
  • The UW Planetarium: The UW Astronomy Department also runs its own full-sized planetarium and gives shows to students and the public. The next scheduled shows are Dec. 5, 2014, and Feb. 6, 2015. Shows on the first Friday of each month are also in the planning. Learn more online.

The traveling planetarium is an igloo-like fabric dome made by GoDome that stays upright with the help of a high-powered fan. The dome is big enough, if only just, to hold a classroom of students. Operators use a convex mirror, reflecting images from the online telescope program onto the dome to approximate the boundlessness of space.

The planetarium was created in 2012 as part of the Astronomy Department‘s outreach efforts that also include student visits to the UW Planetarium and public star-viewing at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory.

Those campus attractions draw about 1,000 students a year, but oddly, not many from the Seattle area. The mobile planetarium was designed to turn that around and take astronomy to the schools.

Another turnaround is also key to the traveling dome: It uses the online telescope program to “flip” the traditional planetarium experience, enabling students to create their own shows — as they did this evening at Sammamish High.

UW undergraduate student talents were heavily involved with the planetarium’s design and construction — notably Justin Gaily, who has since graduated, who helped develop the dome’s mirror-based optics and wrote curriculum for the planetarium’s use in schools like Sammamish. In fact, Gaily’s design has been duplicated by folks creating similar planetariums in Poland, Australia and England.

“You essentially make little stops,” Gaily said in 2012. “You can say, I want to look at this planet and you can pause the tour and talk about it, then move on and it will pan to the next subject.”

Oliver Fraser, UW astronomy lecturer, sets up for the evening at Sammamish High School in Bellevue. The convex mirror at left was an innovation by student Justin Gaily, who has since graduated.

Oliver Fraser, UW astronomy lecturer, sets up for the evening at Sammamish High School in Bellevue. The convex mirror at left used to reflect Worldwide Telescope images onto the dome was an innovation by student Justin Gaily, who has since graduated.Mary Levin

Phil Rosenfield, then a doctoral student, headed the design team that also included John Wisniewski, a post-doctoral researcher who has since taken a faculty position at the University of Oklahoma. Now, Oliver Fraser, a lecturer in astronomy, takes the planetarium on the road to its school visits — with the help of volunteers and sometimes almost singlehandedly.

Fraser said last school year, 1,700 people saw presentations inside the traveling dome, “thanks in part to some very busy science fairs,” and of those, about 100 were elementary and middle-school students giving the planetarium presentations they had created themselves.

More than just intergalactic show-and-tell, the dome is a teaching tool.

“Students are often impressed with the scale of the visuals once they are immersed in the worlds of the solar system, but to get to that point they have had to learn how to work something entirely new, and have prepared to give a presentation to their peers,” Fraser said. “I think these experiences help prepare people for learning and using whatever technology will be common in their adult lives.”

Fraser hopes use of the mobile astronomy unit will continue to increase with time and growing public awareness.

Students at Sammamish High School stand with the UW's tent-like mobile planetarium the evening of Wed., Oct. 29, 2014, before climbing inside to give their own planetarium presentations. At the far right is UW volunteer Dave Brodhead, and next to him is Oliver Fraser, UW lecturer in astronomy.

Students at Sammamish High School stand with the UW’s tent-like mobile planetarium the evening of Wed., Oct. 29, 2014, before climbing inside to give their own planetarium presentations. At the far right is UW volunteer Dave Brodhead, and next to him is Oliver Fraser, UW lecturer in astronomy. The two set up the whole planetarium in about 15 minutes.Mary Levin

“I’ve told my volunteers to think of how and where they would like to use the mobile planetarium,” he said.

“I’d love for the people who have presented so much to others to bring the dome to their own communities. I’m also hoping to partner with community centers in Seattle that often look for programming — working with them is a great way to reach students whose schools find it harder to make space and time for the mobile planetarium.”

The traveling planetarium will get some additional exposure when the American Astronomical Association hosts its annual meeting in Seattle in January 2015. Fraser will join representatives of Microsoft as they present information on the use of the Worldwide Telescope in that international conference,

Back inside the dome at Sammamish High, students and their teacher, Lisa Neshyba, both overcame nerves as presentations continued and planets loomed and soared massively overhead.

Student Georgia Phillips concluded a presentation on Saturn and its moons with a dome-filling image of the ringed planet as seen from its most planetlike moon, Titan.

“It’s a lot like Earth in the amount of liquid on it,” Georgia said as Neshyba, Fraser and her fellow students listened in the reflected glow. “And what’s interesting is that there could possibly be life there — we just don’t know.”

After a well-deserved round of applause that reverberated flatly inside the crowded mobile planetarium, Neshyba added her own comment to the students: “I am so proud of you right now,” she said.

  • Watch the UW Mobile Planetarium get set up, used and taken down all in a minute. All photos were taken by Mary Levin of UW Photography.

 

 

 

 

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