From grande dame to digital future
It’s a good day at the Wits planetarium when the soundtrack of Vangelis, the Greek musician, syncs perfectly with the moving projection of a cluster of stars rising from the rim of the dome, while the room darkens on cue.
“I still get a kick out of it every time,” admits Planetarium supervisor Constant Volschenk, who has played “conductor” hundreds of times for audiences since 1997.
The planetarium has been a popular city fixture since it opened its doors in October 1960. In prepandemic days it welcomed around 60,000 people each year.
In 1956 the Johannesburg City Council decided a planetarium would be the perfect hurrah for a city celebrating its 70th birthday. Wits donated the land, cementing a city and university partnership, and welcomed a unique asset to campus.
Zeiss, the German manufacturer of the star projectors, was not able to manufacture a new projector in time that year, so the Hamburg Planetarium offered to sell their projector to Wits.
Over the years the planetarium has hosted dozens of live and prerecorded shows that have ranged from ancient Egyptian astronomy to exploring major celestial events like solar and lunar eclipses. It has also been the venue for numerous launches and talks.
“Following the Apollo 11 moon landing, the planetarium was one of the first places in SA where people got to watch the recordings of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface. The tapes were flown in from London and someone fetched them directly from the pilots and brought them here. It was such a big event that people were lined up all the way to De Korte Street, waiting to get in. There was no charge to attend,” said Volschenk.
But now it’s time for the grand ol’ dame projector herself to slip into memory.
The Zeiss MKIII will this spring be pensioned off to make room for a rebuild project that will give Wits and the public a research, educational and entertainment resource aligned with 21st-century demands.
Professor Roger Deane, director of the Wits Centre for Astrophysics and SKA chair in Radio Astronomy, says the multimillion-rand digital upgrade will transform the familiar dome into a hi-tech, fully immersive, multisensory, multidimensional resource. Like an IMAX theatre experience — just better. “Many researchers across many fields feel as if we are basically drowning in data.
“At the same time, data sets are becoming more complex and more multidimensional. A resource like Wits’ new Digital Dome is a way of honing a more intuitive understanding of big data,” says Deane.
The technology will be a boon to science and research, while also hitting the sweet spot for entertaining and educating a modern-day public. As an example, Deane says, it could be threedimensional shows made from drone footage swooping through the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), or visualising what the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland, is measuring as particles are smashed together.
“The Digital Dome will become a visualisation laboratory that will have countless applications and opportunities for collaborations, including creating local content for showcasing a wide range of academic disciplines, from lightning research to multilayered biodiversity data, as well as advancements in the digital arts,” he says.
It could also serve as an additional medium to highlight some of the Wits Art Museum’s 16,000 artefacts, for instance.
Or as a virtual walk-through of the world-renowned active archaeological dig sites that Wits has been excavating and studying, or even present visualisations and immersive experiences for a community of researchers to better understand ocean conditions, to study climate science, or to virtually explore underground mines towards improving strategies to reduce mining accidents or to limit environmental damage.
“The emphasis on multi- and trans-disciplinary research and applications is critical to give the new Digital Dome continued relevance, access for those from disadvantaged communities in particular, and for it to justify the big spend,” says Deane.
The Wits council has already committed the seed funds and a corporate donor is also onboard. Construction of the new Digital Dome has already started.
The Digital Dome is a way of honing a more intuitive understanding of big data Professor Roger Deane Director of the Wits Centre for Astrophysics