Fifty years of education

TASMANIA’S only planetarium, at Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum, has a special birthday this month.

On January 30, 1968, the first shows were run to excited audiences in the main site of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG), adjacent to Royal Park. In 2009 the planetarium was reestablished at Inveresk, the second of the QVMAG sites. The planetarium continues to go from strength to strength, with thousands of people each year gazing up into its artificial night sky projected onto the interior of its dome.

Our planetarium is the second oldest in Australia; the Melbourne Planetarium began operation in 1965.

“Fixed” planetariums have also been built in Brisbane, Wollongong, Canberra, Adelaide, Bendigo and Perth, although the planetarium in Canberra ceased operation several years ago. In addition to these, there are numerous portable planetaria run by enthusiasts, all of which contribute to Australia’s astronomy education.

Tasmania is a special place for astronomy. Being the most southerly of the Australian

GEORGE

states, we have the best view of the southern sky. This also makes the Launceston planetarium the southernmost in Australia and one of the most southerly in the world.

Sometimes, planetariums can be confused with observatories. A planetarium is a place for indoor entertainment and education — even though it certainly appears to the audience that they are outside at night gazing up to the sky!

An observatory is a place where observations take place of the actual night sky. Some planetariums do have associated observatories, however, and a few times each year the Launceston Planetarium conducts stargazing evenings using its own telescopes and with great assistance from members of the Astronomical Society of Tasmania, who are always enthusiastic to show people the wonderful sights that telescopes can offer.

Much has happened in the planetarium industry over the past 50 years. Projector systems have improved, yielding sharper star images and offering more capabilities. However, the biggest change is the use of digital technology to project images all over the dome. In Launceston, both systems are used so as to give the audiences a fine full-dome video presentation in addition to a breathtaking guided tour of the night sky with a Zeiss star projector.

A lot has happened in astronomy, too, over those years. The planetarium opened at almost the same time as the exciting announcement of the discovery of pulsars. It was also in 1968 that the first people travelled to the vicinity of the moon on the Apollo 8 mission in December of that year. People were walking on the moon not long after that.

The 1970s saw several more successful probes to the planets, two of the most notable of which were the two Voyager craft, which were launched in 1977 and showed us spectacular views of the giant planets from Jupiter to Neptune. They are still transmitting after more than 40 years!

There have been many other solar system probes, and we have seen many great successes. Two of the most memorable for me have been the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft, which landed on the surface of the asteroid Eros, and the Rosetta mission to the rubber duck-shaped Comet ChuryumovGerasimenko.

Observational astronomy has made many exciting advances. One of the most amazing of these was the discovery in the 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This gave rise to the concept of dark energy, which we still do not properly understand.

One of the main advantages of a planetarium is to help people find their way around the sky, and this has been very important to audiences at the Launceston Planetarium. My colleague Chris Arkless and I, as well as our valued planetarium volunteers, thoroughly enjoy making these live presentations.

So here we are — about to celebrate 50 years. We have some special things planned for the week, including free talks at noon each day, safe observation of the sun, and guided tours of the Southern Skies exhibition, which presents Tasmanian astronomy and includes many objects donated to us over the years. These include several from the University of Tasmania, which continues to be involved in important astronomical research.

Check our QVMAG website www.qvmag.tas.gov.au for more information. We’d love to see you at the planetarium during our anniversary week at the Queen Victoria Museum in Invermay Rd, Inveresk.

Space

Martin George is manager of the Launceston Planetarium (QVMAG).