MEDICINE&SCIENCE
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The planetarium seems to suit its namesake, a naturalist and astronomer who lived on a farm just four miles from Catonsville more than 200 years ago. Born in 1731 to a free African-American mother and a father who was a freed slave, the young Banneker proved himself a brilliant student when neighbors made their books and libraries available to him. He eventually became renowned as a mathematician, surveyor and scholar of the stars.
Years later, after making astronomical calculations that predicted solar and lunar eclipses, he included them in his series of widely read almanacs.
“This was a brilliant man who was highly educated at a time when most AfricanAmericans had to live as slaves, never mind learning about the stars and educating the public about them,” Ludwikoski said. “He’s somebody local people should know about.”
When the college found the funding to renovate its math and science building, Ludwikoski and others managed to get more than $200,000 earmarked for the planetarium, which opened in late 2015.
Ludwikoski and Caravello-Hibbert spent several months mastering the new projector, then inaugurated the series of free public shows.
They began last fall, with Friday nights geared toward the general public and Saturday mornings toward children and families in the 70-seat auditorium.
Banneker might well have enjoyed one recent Friday presentation when Ludwikoski entertained more than 40 people with a semi-original presentation on eclipses.
In honor of the total solar eclipse that will be visible across parts of the U.S. this August, he debuted a film that explored what the event will look like from space and from various places on Earth.
He also introduced a full-dome show co-created by Spitz Creative Media, “Solar Superstorms,” that vividly illustrates the inner workings of the sun, including “the tangle of magnetic fields and superhot plasma that vent the sun’s rage in dramatic flares [and] violent solar tornadoes.”
On March 10, he’ll screen a film that shows the sky as it looked on April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere made his legendary “Midnight Ride,” giving visitors a chance to determine for themselves whether there was a full moon during the event, as historians have reported.
Caravello-Hibbert’s recent show, part of the children’s series, opened with a panorama of the sky above campus, then featured the sun crossing that sky and disappearing, revealing a variety of shapes in the stars.
One was the Big Dipper, part of the constellation known to the ancient Romans as Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and to the Algonquins as the mythic hero Gitchi Odjig, the Great Fisher.
“We use the stars to make legends about what’s important to us,” Caravello-Hibbert said.
When the lights came up, Marcus Thomson, 11, a fourth-grader from Baltimore County, was among those in the audience. He has long been interested in the constellations and came to the planetarium with his family.
He already knew quite a bit about Orion and other familiar sights in the northern sky, he said, but this was the first time he had learned about them from a Native American perspective.
He said he hoped to return for another show sometime.
“I just like looking at the stars,” he said.