New planetarium show is like Google Earth for the universe
This amazing new planetarium show is like Google Earth for the universe
We were sailing past the rings of Saturn, the disc of rocks, ice, and moonlets that circle our second-largest neighbor—so naturally my whole body was rattling. It was only after the lights came up that I noticed the actual reason: metal boxes beneath each seat, designed to vibrate our butts in sync with the universe.I was at Worlds Beyond Earth, the new show at the Hayden Planetarium’s Giant Sphere theater at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. And the simulated sensation of spaceflight goes way beyond seat shakers. The museum now boasts what its president, Ellen J Futter, said last year is not only the most advanced planetarium on the planet but “the most advanced planetarium ever attempted.”Earth is surrounded by a strong magnetic field—powered by its hot, churning outer core—forming a shield that deflects solar wind and protects our atmosphere. [Photo: AMNH]Since 1935, the planetarium near Central Park has been a special sort of cosmic cathedral. When it reopened in 2000 as a giant illuminated orb, designed by Polshek Partnership, it appeared to float within a six-story glass case. The planetarium also upgraded its famous Zeiss star projector, which has dazzled generations of starry-eyed kids with its detailed, glimmering replica of the night sky and its tilting-and-whirling mechanism. The current model is the world’s first Zeiss Mark IX.The legendary Zeiss, however, is being eclipsed. Since the turn of the century, the Hayden, like many planetariums, has increasingly also relied on so-called “fulldome” projectors that can cover the entire inside of the dome, immersing the audience in sophisticated imagery. Rather than just letting viewers gaze at the night sky, it lets the planetarium fly audiences to any time and place within it. The current system, built by a company called Christie Digital and installed over the summer, is made up of six custom synchronized projectors that bathe the dome in 8K-resolution laser light at 60 frames per second, with the widest available color range and contrast. (The dome also features 23 speakers and two subwoofers, along with those seat shakers.)Those features mean that the system’s ability to reproduce the universe’s most vivid colors is unrivaled, says Carter Emmart, the museum’s astro-visualization director. And then there are its blacks: blacker than any blacks he’s seen in a fulldome show, the black of space. That kind of blackness, he says, “this is the holy grail.”Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o is the narrator of Worlds Beyond Earth. [Photo: D. Finnin/© AMNH]But the projectors aren’t even the biggest stars of the show. Worlds Beyond Earth is the first new film at the Hayden in six years. The last one, Dark Universe—narrated by Hayden director and Pluto-demoter Neil de Grasse Tyson—was about the phenomena that help to explain the formation of the universe. “Worlds,” written by geologist Natalie Starkey, is more literal and local: in half an hour, we learn how our solar system came to be, what makes for such unwelcoming conditions on other planets, and in turn what makes Earth so habitable. The larger subtle point is underlined near the end by the narrator, the actress Lupita Nyong’o: the Earth’s climate is just right for nurturing life, which means it’s also easy to mess up.Look at our next-door neighbor Venus. “We could almost call it Earth’s twin,” says Nyong’o as we swoop below its thick clouds. Thanks to the Magellan spacecraft, we know that Venus is covered with volcanoes that can feed the atmosphere with water vapor and other gases. Except Venus has no magnetic field, which left it exposed to harsh solar winds that stole its water, allowing carbon dioxide to build up in its atmosphere. That resulted in a global greenhouse effect so intense that the planet’s surface is hot enough to melt lead. Understanding how that happened has taught us about the runaway effects that come with adding more carbon dioxide to our own atmosphere. (The film doesn’t mention it, but our own CO2 levels are now the highest they’ve been in 14 million years.)