Fiske Planetarium

Fiske Planetarium, emeritus prof awarded $2 million NASA grant

Anonymous — Mon, 23 May 2022 22:32:43 +0000

Fiske Planetarium, emeritus prof awarded $2 million NASA grant Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/23/2022 - 16:32

Doug McPherson

This grant will be used to produce full dome videos that will educate the public on NASA’s latest scientific endeavors including two upcoming solar eclipses

University of Colorado Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium and an emeritus professor have won a $2 million grant from NASA to produce videos and distribute them to planetariums around the globe.

Douglas Duncan, emeritus professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and principal investigator for the project, titled “Science Through Shadows: Eclipses and Solar Science, Occultations and Solar System Origins,” will work with John Keller, director of the Fiske Planetarium, to produce videos on the sun, asteroids and NASA missions over the next three and a half years. The videos will be created in both “full-dome” format used by planetariums, and flat screen, used at libraries, schools and on YouTube.

“This award allows Fiske to continue to produce high-quality content on NASA exploration that will be shared with millions of audience members in planetariums across the planet,” Keller says.

At the top of the page: Fiske videos are now being seen worldwide (Photo by Casey Cass). Above: Chris Moore (PhDAstro’17), an astrophysicist at Harvard University, holds his shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the sun. The satellite was featured in one of Fiske Planetarium’s prior educational videos.

Duncan says a major emphasis of the grant and videos are two upcoming solar eclipses, one in October 2023 and another in April 2024, both of which will cross the United States.

“We’ll be producing videos that show people how to safely watch eclipses, why they should see a total eclipse, and what scientists are learning about the sun from eclipses and spacecraft,” Duncan says.

Keller says that in addition to eclipses, the videos will also feature occultations, where an object in our solar system passes in front of a distant star, creating a shadow.

“Occultations are another important technique scientists use,” Keller says. “The science-through-shadows project will share with audiences the adventure of international occultation campaigns that researchers use to plan encounters by spacecraft with asteroids and minor planets.”

Keller adds that researchers use eclipses and occultation to better understand our sun and solar system. “The accuracy and precision with which we can measure planetary positions and characteristics through stellar occultations surpasses even the Hubble or Webb space telescopes,” Keller says.

Another key element of the grant, Duncan says, is reaching audiences that have been “less served or exposed” to resources in science. So Fiske is partnering with museums in Detroit, Michigan, and Oakland, California, and involving high school students from those areas to help with the design and production of some of the videos.

Fiske has been producing videos since 2015, when it remodeled and added digital video production capabilities, including a new staff member to produce videos.

“Our idea was that any faculty member at CU could use Fiske and work with us to support their classes with stunning, 360-degree—full dome—video,” says Duncan, who directed the Fiske Planetarium from 2002 to 2018. “Not just astronomy, it could be geology, art, you name it. But then we went beyond campus, and in 2015 we won our first NASA grant to produce and distribute videos to other planetariums.”

Since then, Fiske has created videos on many topics including how satellites measure ground water, how scientists discover new worlds, the New Horizons spacecraft flying past Pluto, the Parker Solar Probe flying to the sun, moon rocks, miniature satellites and climate change. The videos have been seen in more than 260 planetariums worldwide.

“Our videos show the wide variety of things NASA does—not just Mars and Hubble—that benefit us here on earth, and they also are designed to interest students in space-related careers,” Duncan says. “Space is one of the most important industries in Colorado, and CU is one of the leading universities for space missions and funding by NASA.”

Duncan says the first video produced at Fiske shows how NASA satellites can tell how much water is underground by sensing the slight difference in mass and therefore gravity that’s seen in wet ground compared to dry.

Our videos show the wide variety of things NASA does—not just Mars and Hubble—that benefit us here on earth, and they also are designed to interest students in space-related careers.”

“As California is struggling with drought conditions, NASA can tell them how bad the drought is underground, not just in the visible reservoirs,” Duncan says. “Of course, water is important to people all over. So we tell stories about how NASA data can help us on earth.”

Another video shows how satellites are getting miniaturized and features ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ alumnus, Chris Moore, who now works as an astrophysicist at Harvard University, and his shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the sun.

Duncan says the videos have received “very positive” feedback.

“Medium and small planetariums—which is most of them—don’t have the budget or staff to produce their own videos,” he says.

Keller adds, “Building off the subject matter expertise found throughout ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ and the Front Range, Fiske is well known for producing high-quality, accessible content for the planetarium community.”

“CU is known as a leader in teaching and communicating science,” Duncan says. “For instance, our free science-teaching applets at PhET have been used over 1 billion times. This grant allows us to use our expertise to engage audiences all over the world.”

This grant will be used to produce full dome videos that will educate the public on NASA’s latest scientific endeavors including two upcoming solar eclipses.

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A digital look at ancient skies gets a showing at Fiske

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 07:00:00 +0000

A digital look at ancient skies gets a showing at Fiske Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/17/2016 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Fiske program weds ancient archaeology and astronomy with the latest technology

Having captured the summer solstice and a week’s worth of sunsets, sunrises and their lunar equivalents from the vantage point of ancient Chacoan people in southwestern Colorado, using parabolic video technology, a multi-disciplinary team from the University of Colorado Boulder counted its June 2015 trip a success.

But it wasn’t until they got back to Boulder that the team discovered a truly unexpected gem: A mesmerizing show by the Aurora Borealis, which rarely dips so far south.

Fiske Video Producer Thor Metzinger shooting at Chimney Rock National Monument. Photo by Bill Hanson. Click on picture for larger image.

Fiske Video Producer Thor Metzinger shooting at Chimney Rock National Monument. Photo by Bill Hanson.

“We were photographing kivas” — Chacoan religious structures — “that are oriented with the axis pointed to the north,” says J. McKim Malville, professor emeritus of astrophysical and planetary sciences. “The cameras were set up automatically to run all night.”

Back at CU, one of the crew going over the time-lapse footage at a major kiva noticed that something was flickering in the sky. A check of records from solar monitors confirmed that a blast of activity, a coronal mass ejection, had created spectacular auroral displays across North America that night.

“It’s extraordinary; we have time-lapse photography at the Great Kiva in Pueblo Bonito with the aurora lighting the sky behind it,” says Erica Ellingson, associate professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences.

The unexpected aurora created a connection across hundreds of years to the Chacoans, who left behind a petroglyph of an explosion blowing off part of the solar corona during a total solar eclipse of July 11, 1097. Some of these so-called coronal mass ejections cause aurora on the Earth.

And here’s good news for anyone who loves deserts, stars and ancient peoples: The aurora footage will be part of an upcoming program at newly renovated Fiske Planetarium on the archaeological astronomy of the ancient Chacoan people. Between the full-dome photography and the planetarium’s high-res, 8,000-pixel dome, audience members will be stunned by the realism of the space.

“We can show fully spherical movies on the dome. The feeling is going to be pretty similar to standing there at the site,” says Ellingson, who is writing and producing the show, along with Fiske creative director Thor Metzinger.

It’s fascinating that ancient people, a thousand years ago, were watching the same skies with great detail and attention, right in our back yard. We’re really excited to bring those stories to light at Fiske.”

Steven Lekson, professor of anthropology and curator of anthropology at the CU Museum of Natural History, provided archaeological expertise for the team.

The program, supported by a technology grant from CU’s ASSETT teaching with technology program and IMPART program for multi-cultural programming, can trace its roots to a struggling student 30 years ago in Malville’s introductory astronomy course.

To improve his grade, Mark Nuepert asked if he could write a paper about a stone that was oriented to the sun at the Yellow Jacket Ruin in southwest Colorado. Neupert had attended an archaeology field school at Yellow Jacket let by the legendary CU archaeologist Joe Ben Wheat.

Not only did he write the paper, but he took his professor out there, studied the ruin more thoroughly with him, and jointly presented a paper at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

A petroglyph of an eclipse is seen with a wide-angle lens in a photograph at Chaco Canyon, where CU-Boulder researchers captured a rare Aurora Borealis in the southern night sky. Photo courtesy of Fiske Planetarium.

Encouraged by Malville, Neupert went on to graduate magna cum laude from CU and obtain a PhD in archaeology. Malville was also transformed by that experience, which inspired him to create a new course, Ancient Astronomies of the World, and begin taking more students into the field.

The Chacoan, or Ancestral Puebloan, people lived in the in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico as early as 600 A.D. In the 11th century, they began building structures, known as Great Houses and Great Kivas, some of which were based on the movements on the sun, moon and stars. The Great House and kiva built on the high mesa at Chimney Rock Pueblo, for example, were at a place where the moon could be observed appearing between its two natural spires on an 18-year cycle, a fact discovered by Malville in 1988, and observed by him and his students, probably for the first time since the site had been abandoned some 900 years earlier.

“I had calculated that the moon would come up through the chimneys sometime on the night of Aug. 8,” he says. Sure enough, it did, and he correctly predicted that the conjunction would not occur again until 2004.

Later he discovered that tree dates confirmed that the buildings had been constructed in the 11thcentury at the times when the moon made its appearance between the chimneys. “Many important discoveries made in Chaco, Mesa Verde and Chimney Rock have been by my team of CU students, mostly undergraduates.”

When the U.S. secretaries of the interior and agriculture came to designate Chimney Rock a national monument in 2012 — partly in recognition of discoveries by Malville, Lekson and CU students — a local brewery created a special brew, Ancestor Ale, with a label that featured the moonrise between the spires.

The moon will not rise between the chimneys for another seven years, but the Fiske team filmed multiple alignments between the sun and stars and archaeological ruins at Chimney Rock, Aztec National Monument, Salmon Ruins and Chaco Culture National Historical Park. These alignments, visible only at the summer solstice, show how the Chacoans created intimate connections between their world and the sky.

The week-long shoot was grueling, as the team battled blazing summer temperatures, torrential rainstorms and long hikes into the desert laden with heavy gear. They rose each day at 3:45 a.m. to load up and drive to make that day’s sunrise shoot. They often worked until close to midnight, after filming sunset and setting up the cameras for all-night filming.

Ellingson was enthralled by the experience: “It was exhausting, but being in these places, watching the sun rise, was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had.”

Ellingson, who is now teaching Ancient Astronomies of the World, will present the premier program on March 11. She is now working with CU-Boulder crowd-funding staff to raise funds to create a version of a show that will be shared with other planetariums worldwide.

“It’s fascinating that ancient people, a thousand years ago, were watching the same skies with great detail and attention, right in our back yard,” Ellingson says. “We’re really excited to bring those stories to light at Fiske.”

The Fiske production is scheduled to be the subject of a crowdfunding campaign later this spring. For more information on Fiske Planetarium, click here.

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer and longtime Boulder journalist.