continued - Great Lakes Planetarium Association

STATE NEWS (continued) GLPA Newsletter Winter Solstice, 2010
shows in October! That’s impressive for a planetarium that only seats thirty comfortably! They also
welcomed a new staff member in June. Sara Kubarek is the new Educator and Manager for Youth Programs
at the Kingman Museum and Leila Arboretum Society. She is the first staff member to be shared
as a part of the two organizations’ strategic alliance. Kubarek will be coordinating and leading all youth
programs for both organizations, which includes the presentation of planetarium programs.
Since the 2009 GLPA Conference at Bay City’s Delta College Planetarium, the projection
system has been upgraded to Evans & Sutherland’s Digistar 4. The central projection pit has been removed
and sixteen more seats added in the center. A new five-button interactive system from E & S has been installed
and the staff is excited about using it to involve visitors in the planetarium experience. With the holiday season upon us,
guests can experience The Mystery of The Christmas Star and/or Season of Light. In addition there will be the annual
“Holiday Stars and Crafts” event for kids, where learning about the sky is combined with craft-making. Plus, a special
program and speaker for senior citizens dealing with the Star of Bethlehem will round out the holiday offerings. As the
planetarium shifts to the winter season, The Zula Patrol and Black Holes will invade the dome for visitor’s viewing pleasure.
Grand Rapids’ Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium spent the first few weeks of autumn running back-to-back presentations
of full-dome art installations during the city’s second annual Artprize event, using a rented Evans & Sutherland
Digistar 4 system. Over the 17 days of Artprize, the Grand Rapids Public Museum, home of the Chaffee Planetarium, saw
over 200,000 individuals visit the 72 pieces installed in the museum (including three in the planetarium). The remainder
of the season has been spent embroiled in production for Our Bodies in Space, a show looking at the short- and long-term
effects of space on the human body to accompany the plastinated cadaver exhibit “Bodies Revealed,” arriving at the end
of November.
The Vollbrecht Planetarium in Southfield is nearing the end of the Fall Series consisting of eight shows presented
by Mike Best. Show topics were “UFOs & SETI,” “Interstellar Travel & Nebulae,” and “Birth, Life and Death of
the Milky Way.” Vollbrecht continues to give private shows and shows for public schools on request.
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Ohio will have its state meeting on Saturday, May 7, 2011 at the Westminster College
Planetarium in Westminster, Pennsylvania. Dr. Tom Oberst will serve as host.
The new planetarium person at the University of Findlay’s Newhard Planetarium is
Dr. Todd C. McAlpine (mcalpine@findlay.edu) for whom the planetarium is part of his responsibilities
as a new Assistant Professor of Physics. While Todd’s Ph.D. is from the University
of Kansas, his B.S. degree was from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
At Sandusky’s Sidney Frohman Planetarium, Lois Wolf ran Legends in the Autumn
Skies for their fall public show. Lois comments that she “used some of the wonderful graphics
and stories from Dayle Brown’s Milky Way book, as well as the Native American story of the
Big Bear and the Braves and Greek and Roman mythology of Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and Perseus. People should know
that all the images from Dayle’s books are available on DVD to GLPA members. What a nice gift!”
Mythology is also in vogue at the Vandalia-Butler Planetarium at Smith Middle School where Scott Oldfield
tells the stories of the Summer Triangle and gives lessons on the properties of stars in the early fall, then switches to
Perseus stories in the later fall as the sky changes. Scott notes that these constellations are serving as a base upon which is
built Bayer Designations/the magnitude scale (Cassiopeia), equatorial coordinates (Pegasus), variable stars (Cepheus,
Cetus, and Perseus), and galaxies and distances (Andromeda).
From the Shaker Heights High School Planetarium, Gene Zajac and crew are learning to use the Media Manager
system that Bowen Technovation installed this fall. The elementary program in Shaker remains active and districts
outside of Shaker are using the Shaker Planetarium for their field trips. Beachwood Schools (eastern suburb of Cleveland)
brought their second graders for the first time and is likely to return.
Kelly Jons, Bryan Child, and Gene are planning evening observing sessions before the snow accumulates. Earlier,
on September 18, Bryan, Joe Marencik, Joe’s boy scout group, and Gene helped with “International Observe the Moon
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