SPOTLIGHT ON PLUTO
New show at Telus Spark
Telus Spark has a new show that is a work in progress that spans 41/2 billion kilometres and nine years.
That’s because Our Solar System, one of the shows running in the science centre’s domed theatre, is focusing on Pluto this summer.
Tuesday at lunch, the Herald caught the show, along with several dozen school kids, on the same day NASA beamed back the first closeup photos of Pluto from New Horizon, a satellite that was launched in January, 2006 and travelled 41/2 billion kilometres to score those Tuesday photos.
Rather than presenting astronomy as historical artifact, Telus Spark is presenting it ripped straight from a Twitter feed.
“We started working on the show months ago,” Our Solar System writer and director Barry Thorson says, “to make sure it was ready to go by July 14, and had enough runs to get the kinks out of it.
“It’s cool,” he says. “This is the first time I’ve done some personally since I’ve been managing this venue to coincide with current events.
“I was pretty excited,” he adds, “to be able to bring the whole history and mythology and story around it with a current image from 41/2 billion kilometres away. I love that.”
The show explores the history and mythology of Pluto through the eyes of Clyde Tombaugh, a Midwesterner who discovered Pluto in 1930.
It combines Tombaugh’s sense of wonder about the expanse of the universe, together with presenting facts and myths about Pluto that one might expect from a science centre presentation about the solar system.
It’s part of the plan from Thorson, whose background is in theatre — he has worked on many Theatre Calgary productions over the years and ran the Lone Wolf Theatre in Cochrane — and thinks there’s a way to incorporate his storytelling background into making science education more accessible for Telus Spark audiences.
“I love those moments,” Thorson says, “in literature and theatre, that are just so key when that ‘ Aha!’ moment happens for somebody — and I think that’s exactly what happened for him as far as I can tell from all the research I’ve done.”
And Thorson has discovered that if ever there was a place to showcase ‘ Aha!’ moments, it’s at a science centre.
“I’ve always maintained that people come to a science centre to be educated, to expand their knowledge base, to do some hands on learning, to play, to explore, but I still think when you come into the theatre, whether you can articulate it or not, you have this expectation to be moved.
“Before you’re educated,” he says, “before you’re taught or you’re informed, there’s something there that you want to be moved by. And story’s always been the best mover I know.”
The question is, since New Horizons launched in 2006, Pluto has been downgraded to the status of dwarf planet by an international panel of scientists and astronomers.
Now that the photographs are rolling in from five billion kilometres away, could Pluto regain planetary status?
Thorson says whether it does or doesn’t isn’t really the issue.
“That would be ( a question) for all the members of the IAU, scientists and engineers and astronomers and everybody else across the globe to make the decision — but finally, you know, does it really matter?
“The fact that it’s just so much in the media now, and so much in the attention of everybody from the most dedicated astronomers right down to dudes like me, who write stories, down to my kids, going, ‘ What’s going on?,’ ” he says
“Regardless of how it’s classified, it’s still that far away and still looks like this and it’s the first time we’ve seen it this up close.
“We’re good,” he says. “We’re broadening our horizons — picking things out that we’ve never seen before.”