The planetarium as a teaching space

 I love the Rauch Planetarium at the University of Louisvlle as the place to teach Astronomy in. That probably doesn’t sound controversial to you when an astronomer says so but apparently it is?

A space dedicated to showing the night sky and our Universe gets students already in an astronomy frame of mind. But it goes beyond that. So much beyond that.

Not only can we show how the night sky looks without the city lights or the ever multiplying artificial satellites thanks to Starlink and others mega-constellations. We can show how it looked to ice age hunter-gatherers or people in the Southern hemisphere. That links us all across the globe and along the age of the human race. It also allows me to link what you see in the night sky directly to physics. We have a program that shows the (now familiar) stars in the night sky which then move to their place on the color-luminosity diagram and the class learns the link between temperature and luminosity of stars around us. That kind of linking between sky and physics is what my class is all about. More planetarium resources like this are made available by federal projects like the Rubin Observatory and NASA.

Alternatively I can link stars and navigation like the student have seen in the Disney movie Moana. Or we can work on the different constellations across global cultures. Shared exploration like we do in the planetarium is what we aim for in higher education and the Planetarium supercharges that for my subject astronomy.

One of the NASA shows showing the ISS with its cosmic ray detectors. 

This shared experience is teaching them collectively, a superpower for learning. When we learn together, we do it better and faster. If we do all our learning on individual screens, it remains an isolating experience.

If you want to enjoy the planetarium, you cannot have your screen out. It makes a difference.

Unfortunately, my class is the first and often only time students at UofL see inside this amazing space. The Louisville schools have not had the opportunity to organize school trips to the Planetarium because it closed and stayed closed since March 2020. And that is a shame but also a missed opportunity for UofL. These school trips brought those middle- and high school students to campus who might consider UofL for their immediate future.

This is a traditional slide, similar to the ones I use in class. And then we switch to the dome projection of the same data. It makes a huge difference!

The obstacle is two things, staff and equipment, but really that’s both a money issue. Staff got reassigned within UofL but we are at risk of not having people who know how to run a planetarium anymore. And the equipment is now well over 20 years old. It’s starting to show its age (“why is half the sky brighter than the other?”) The shows aged a bit too. We have a show where Liam Neeson confidently states there is no direct picture of a black hole. My science hasn’t sat still since that show came out: it made a picture of a black hole, found the first galaxies and more than 5000 planets around nearby stars. Just to give you an idea. More up-to-date material would be great.

The planetarium does two things that are increasingly rare in the modern world: a good look at the night’s sky and space and a shared learning experience for students.

The author with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey exhibit in the hall of the Planetarium. I got the SDSS plate but the staff turned it into the amazing exhibit.