PHOTOESSAY OF THE HAYDEN PLANETARIUM - 50-59 of 60
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John Pazmino
NYSkies Astronomy Inc
www.nyskies.org
nyskies@nyskies.org
2000 May 10
SESSION 50 - 1999 JULY 7
----------------------
This, the 7th of July, a Wednesday, was the first day of relief
from a torrid heatstorm. The storm centered on the 4th of July weekend
with temperatures nicking 40c with 100% relative humidity. During the
night of July 5-6 the air cooled off to 'only' 30C. I grabbed this day
to visit the site being that I'm going on holiday on Friday and
Thursday may be busy at work.
Before getting into today's session I thank the many readers who
pointed out some silly errors in session 49 from June 15. Yes, there
is only one subway I spoke of and its the 81st, like in 'eighty-first',
Street station. I made the corrections in the archival copies of the
photoessays. [This is corrected in this edition of the
photoessay.]
A couple readers, apparently newer ones, asked what is a 'two-
seat' ride. Am I that fat? No. It means a ride requiring two trains
with a change at Columbus Circle. Thus I sit on one seat in the first
train and on an other seat in the second train. (A one-seat ride means
that I rode a single train, sitting on one seat, straight to the
Planetarium.)
The heatstorm brought some havoc to the City. One was an electric
power outage in the panhandle of Manhattan, covering Coogan's Bluff.
This severed the northern termini of the Independent, causing
wholesale reroutes thruout that system.
Thus at 13:00 EDST I rode from Herald Square to the Museum by a
single train, a one-seat ride. The train was a reroute due to the
power shutdown. I arrived at the Planetarium at 13:20 EDST. The ride
was a bit longer on account of trains being juggled around.
The sky was clear blue with only a few small cirrus clouds around
the horizon. There was a continuous soft breeze that carried off the
dampness of sweat from my face. I wore my windbreaker, tho I was
definitely warm in it, for its pockets to carry my camera and
monocular.
The site was quiet like on previous occasions but there was a
major difference. The box looked much smoother than before and more
finished. Yep, one of the workers noted that the glass panels were
attached in the last couple of weeks. They looked opaque at first,
obscuring everything inside. With the monocular I saw that they merely
were reflecting the outside landscape while standing against a mass of
scaffolds behind them.
The grounds were generally clean, as if sweeped off. There was no
major trash or rubbish anywhere. One garbage truck emerged from the
grounds by the west gate while I was there, but otherwise there was no
vehicle movement. A few workers walked across the site.
The trees were so full and dense that the Planetarium is mostly
blocked from 81st Street. Even from the gates overhanging branches
poked into my view. But this umbration shaded me from the Sun and
induced cool breezes.
The streets and park were alive with people soaking up the air
following several days of unescapable sauna. The dogs and runners were
desporting in the dogrun.
After about 20 minutes I headed back to the station but an Eighth
Avenue bus slided into the bus stop. I took it back to Penn Station. On
the way I looked over the streetlight replacement in Broadway. The
work seems to be going slowly or even maybe paused. About the same
progress was evident now as a month or so ago, with one or two new
poles in place.
After debarking at Penn Station I stopped for lunch in Herald
Square and then went back to my office.
SESSION 51 - 1999 JULY 26
-----------------------
I had to visit the site soon being that in a couple weeks I'm off
to see the solar eclipse. So I made up my mind over the past weekend
to just go on Monday the 26th of July in 1999. It happened that the
City was in the depths of a heatstorm that sent temperatures into the
upper 30Cs with quite 100% relative humidity.
I set off for the Planetarium at 12:45 EDST on this 26th of July
by the one-seat ride from Herald Square. When I arrived at 81st Street
station workers were busily finishing up the task of rebuilding the
place. There's lots more left to do but enough is done to make the
station really pleasant.
Of special note was the addition of the IND racing stripe.
Queerly, this station and the others on the very first section of the
Independent are the most nonIND stations in the system! They lacked
that racing stripe! So a new one, thinner than the normal width, is now
in place on the lower platform. Because the upper platform has a lower
ceiling, the racing strip is set lower on the wall and is interuppted
by the large name panels.
A bit of nonastronomy history. The Independent set of subway
lines, or IND, was designed to embed a color coded map for its
stations. The code was in the name plaque and racing stripe. Both are
of two colors but reversed from each other. That is, the border color
of the name plaque is the field color of the racing tripe, and vice
versa.
The idea was that a rider could follow the pattern of the colors
know where he was on the subway and suss out how to get to his
destination. Three monkey wrenches were thrown into the gears.
One was that the code was never published! To this very day no one
has ever cracked the code and laid out a correct explanation for the
colors. This feature of the IND has been used to emphasize the
essential impossibility of interpreting extraterrestrial signals. If
we can not on Earth figure out something so simple as a set of colors
intended for public benefit, how can we ever hope to understand radio
broadcasts from totally alien creatures?
The second was that the colors were awfully subtile. Altho the
81st St station has 'blue' and 'black' for its colors, they are
slightly different from the 'blue' and 'black' of, say, 72nd Street
station, the next one going downtown. Yet it is this difference that
somehow clues the rider in his journey.
A third, modern, monkey wrench is that the stations in the 1960s
were fitted with fluorescent lamps. The colors were fitted to the
original yellowish incandescent lamps. The new lamps totally distort the
colors out of any possible validity.
On the street I headed right into the shade of the trees in
Roosevelt Park. The Sun was too burning to stay under it. I was in
short sleeves yet I perspired briskly even while resting. The heat got
to the park denizens, too. They walked slowly or sat on the benches.
No fast jogging or running on this dog.
The new feature today is the closing off of the west gate on the
circular drive. The entry at the street, next to the upper guardhouse,
was blocked by a hunk of snow fence. The roadway was newly segregated
from the footway by a chest-high stud-&-plywood fence.
This walled off the lower guardhouse and gate from approach, yet
left the footway fully attached to the paths within the park. For
worker access, there is a simple door cut into the fence at about the
midpoint. Several workers came and went thru this door.
Recall that the circular drive has two concentric paths. The inner
one with cobblestones is for vehicles. The outer laid with hexstones
is for foot traffic and connects to the paths in Roosevelt Park.
The upper guardhouse was crewed. The guards here checked in the
workers to enter the site. They chatted with several workers who just
left the site. I asked if I may go down to the lower gate. No, the
public area is now removed back to this new fence.
The cobblestones in the roadway were pulled up and the soil now
exposed seemed to be raked or otherwise smoothed out.
My view of the structure were vastly diminished. I no longer had
the proximity of the western lower gate. Thru the monocular, the
panels looked like they were recently cleaned. Reflections of the
scenery in them were sharp and clear.
A stick crane was busily moving loads around the grounds. The
machine was partly obscured by trees and the contractor's original
wall so I couldn't tell what was going on.
The glass box looks more or less complete. If the outer scaffold
were removed, the whole thing would have smooth contours all over. The
box was still opaque from the mass of interior framing and scaffolds.
Views of the Planetarium from 81st Street were about hopeless. The
trees were so thick with leafs that they presented a mostly solid
barricade against sightlines from the street.
The east gate is now the only adit for motor vehicles. A couple
trucks entered the grounds by this gate. Its guardhouse was empty and
the trucks rode onto the premises without stopping to check in. The
chain at this gate was removed completely. Previously it was hanging
loose on the ground.
Viewed from this east gate the grounds were overall clean and
litter free. Construction material was set out here and there in neat
piles. The stick crane, in front of the new car garage, was hidden
behind the glass box.
Back at the west gate there was a new large billboard within the
park. It announces the general rehabilitation by the Parks Department
of Roosevelt Park. This is a project separate from the Planetarium and
North Side project but is coordinated with it. The heavy work on the
Museum campus has to be completed first before major work can begin in
the park. Hence, after the Planetarium opens, visitors will be
somewhat inconvenienced by construction activity in the park around it
for some many more months.
The Planetarium may open in February, rather than in spring, of
2000, according to a status report presented by director Dr Neil
Tyson. He gave his report, illustrated by slides, at the Moonwalk lawn
party on 17 July. This was a program of the Parks Department with the
collaboration of the Association and several other space-related
interests.
The heat was getting the better of me; I quit the site at 13:30. A
West End local flew into the subway station almost as I stepped onto
the platform and I rode it all the way back to work.
SESSION 52 - 1999 AUGUST 31
-------------------------
Being that I was away for most of August in Turkey for the solar
eclipse on 1999 August 11, I squeezed in two visits to the
Planetarium. The first, session 51, was on July 26th and this, session
52, was on Tuesday, August 31st. I went to the site by the two-seat
ride from Herald Square, arriving there at 12:50 EDST.
The air was cool, about 20C, dry, refreshingly breezy. The sky was
generally clear with a bright, but not overly brilliant, Sun. I was
glad I had my windbreaker and long-sleeve shirt. Yet I was actually
very glad for this weather! After all, in Turkey in August the
temperature was never less than 35C and it hit 44C on a couple days!
The scene at the Planetarium is totally changed! Major
construction started within Roosevelt Park, with machinery and piles
of dirt all over the place! The park from the east gate of the
circular drive all the way to Columbus Av and 79th Street was fenced
off with a chainlink fence. The fence was weak, easily toppled, only
the uprights were holding the mesh. The top edge, about 2 meters off
the ground, was left rough.
This fence hemmed in the park at the street. No entry into it was
permitted and 'Danger - keep out' signs were posted along the fence
every few meters. However, a gate in this fence at the east gate of
the circular drive was open and I ambled down to the contractor's wall
for my inspection.
The guard and I chatted. She noted that the park work began a
couple weeks ago but it does not interfere with he work on the
Planetarium. Almost all of the original contractor's wall is removed
allowing clear sight of the lower portions of the Planetarium from the
street.
Some of the exterior scaffolding on the glass box was removed.
The interior scaffolding still filled the box, making the structure
still opaque.
There was an idle stick crane at the northwest corner of the
Planetarium, near the lower west gate. The scene was quiet. All noise
came from activity within the park. A couple Planetarium workers came
and went during my visit. No vehicles entered or left the grounds.
From 81st Street, the open prospect thru where the contractor's
wall stood partly made up for the obscuration of view by the dense
leafs on the trees. The trees in the park were caged with laths to
prevent accidental damage. This is a standard practice in the City.
Trees are assessed for preservation and left in place.
Just about everything else in the park is torn up: furniture,
lamppoles, paving. The entry at Columbus Avenue and 81st Street is
fitted with a chainlink gate. The pillars are beefed up here to
support this gate. An other similar gate closed off the entry at the
west gate of the circular drive. The chest high wood fence from the
last visit is gone and the footpath in this area is all broken up.
The dogrun was moved to a temporary site on Columbus Avenue at
79th Street. It's the same size as the old one but has a more
substantial fence. Entry is by a double gate, like a canal lock, made
of rough lumber and plywood. The dog and its runner are passed thru in
two steps such that the two doors are never simultaneously open.
Picture taking was not seriously hindered. The mesh on the
chainlink fence was loose enough to fit the camera lens. But, of
course, all photos were taken from the street with no entree into the
park at any point.
The guard believes the Planetarium will be open by yearend for
shakedown tests and commissioned in February of 2000. With the park
work still under way then the approach to the Planetarium will be from
only the east gate, which will be paved and curbed in plenty of time,
and from within the Museum. The west gate will remain closed due to
the park renovation.
Apparently, altho the guard did not mention it, this closes off
use of the new car garage for the first few months of operation of the
new Hayden Planetarium. Road access to it is by this west gate and a
new one from 79th St, both within the project frontier of the park.
After about a halfhour, at 13:20, I left for work, getting there
by the two-seat ride from the 81st Street subway station.
SESSION 52 - 1999 SEPTEMBER 24
----------------------------
The long interval since the last visit, on 1999 August 31, comes
from the erratic weather in the City during September. Days were
capriciously sunny or rainy regardless of weather forecasts. On this
Friday the 24th of September the day stayed sunny and I scooted up to
the Planetarium at 12:30 EDST by the two-seat ride from Herald Square.
The temperature was about 25C with no breeze. The Sun was bright
in a normal blue sky. I happened to be wearing my hooded jacket, the
one from my eclipse trip to Aruba in 1998 February. It was too heavy
for today. I left it unzipped.
Overall the scene is unchanged from the last visit. There was
ongoing construction within the park. Earthmovers were sculpting the
ground and all the furniture and fixtures were in disarray or broken
up. Due to strong wind in the previous couple days some of the wood
cages protecting trees were skewed. These are flimsily made from scrap
lumber and nails. In other places where trees are so protected, the
cages are left toppled until removed. Probably they'll here stay that
way, too.
My approach to the grounds was constrained more than last time.
The east gate is now closed from the public. At street level the
perimeter chainlink fence extended across the circular drive but the
swinging door was open. I walked down to the guardhouse where a guard
greeted me. She explained that in the last week or so this entry is no
longer accessible to the public.
She noted the gate was open at the street to allow passage of
vehicles, this now being the only adit to the site. She let me linger
for a moment to take a picture.
The view from the street was open from the previous removal of the
contractor's fence and the shade from dense leafs on the trees. While
the branches hung low, they left enough sightline for good views.
At the time a dumpster was being muscled around in front of the
Planetarium. An empty one was shoved bu its truck into the front
entry, under the stone arch, of the Planetarium and a full one was
pulled out. Eventually while I watched, the truck hauled off the full
dumpster thru the east gate and into 81st Street.
The cube of the new Planetarium is still filled with scaffolds. It
is still generally opaque inside. From colleagues seen at AAA meetings
I learned that there is nothing inside that's finished for occupancy,
not even temporary quarters for the staff. All Planetarium crew still
is officed within the Museum.
The new garage next to the Planetarium looks structurally
complete. It is still used for laydown and work space for the
Planetarium.
I did not walk all around the park this time being that it was in
total upheaval. I did take a couple photos of the works for context. I
found myself on the Columbus Avenue side of the park when I finished
my inspection. Rather than go back to the IND station I walked to the
79th Street station of the IRT. The main reason was that I had some
errand in West Village to look after and this line goes directly to
there. I left the site at 13:30 EDST.
SESSION 54 - 1999 OCTOBER 22
--------------------------
It's been almost a full month since the last visit to the
Planetarium, mostly because I was repeatedly busy during lunch. My
ladylove has hospital visits in midday and I accompany her. She's
doing well and from time to time she doesn't need me. So today, the
22nd of October, I hopped over to the site by the one-seat ride from
Herald Square at quite 12:10 EDST, and arrived there at 12:30.
The day was mostly cloudy with cumulus congestus, temperature
about 20C, and breezy. I was coming off of a sore throat so I wore my
winter coat to ward off the breeze and contain any chill that may
erupt. It turned out to be too hot in the coat and I left it unzipped.
In fact, the general walking about in the fresh air alleviated my
illness.
The major new feature today was the opening of the west gate to
vehicles. The circular drive was repaved with cobbles and recurbed,
all part of the overhaul of the Theodore Roosevelt Park fronting 81st
Street. Assorted small trucks flew in and out of this gate during my
visit. Some were for the Planetarium. Others were for the Park.
The guardhouse at street level was relocated to the east or inner
side of the circular drive. It was previously between the vehicular
and pedestrian roads. I asked the guard if I could go down to the
inner gate for a better look at the works. She explained that this
here point at street level was the limit of public access and she
could not let me enter. So all my viewing, like on the last couple
visits, was from the street on 81st Street.
The other major change was that the cube, the glass box, is now
free of most of the internal scaffolding. It is all transparent and
you can see thru it. However, the sphere-in-cube effect is lost being
that the rear face of the Planetarium abuts the opaque Museum. Perhaps
the lack of Sun with collateral lack of shadow caused this appearance.
On a day with strong Sun I'm sure the Hayden Sphere will stand out
well.
In the Park work was proceding vigorously. Earthmovers were
digging around and construction sheds were plopped down all over the
place. The noise, tho not offensive, was the loudest I heard from the
site in many visits. Workers entered and left thru the west gate
continuously.
The east gate was open but the public is barred from entering it.
There were workers milling around it but they were part of the crew
working on the subway station underneath of here. This station, 81st
Street on the IND Eighth Avenue line, is about finished with new
mechanical and electrical systems, tiling and decorations, lighting,
and other conveniences. Some punchlist items were evident. The south
adit at 79th Street is still closed. Temporary signs directed all
riders to the north end at 81st Street for the Museum.
On Central Park West between 80th and 81st Street a sidewalk cut
was opened for steam. The crew working on it said they were coupling
the steam service to the new Planetarium. As you know, planetaria do
use lots af steam and the easiest and cheapest way to supply it is to
plug into the mains under the street.
With a lingering doubt for the smarts of staying around outdoors
with a sore throat and with little more to inspect, I left the site at
13:00 EDST. I arrived back at work by a one-seat ride at 13:15.
SESSION 55 - 1999 DECEMBER 7
--------------------------
As things turned out there was no site visit during all of
November. There's no particular cause for this, altho the weather was
a bit erratic, making for some rather dissuasive days. So it was on
Tuesday, the 7th of December in 1999, that I got to the Planetarium.
I left work at 13:00 EST and arrived by the one-seat ride from
Herald Square station. The day was sunny, temperature about 5C with a
continuous breeze. I had my winter coat zipped up most of the time.
The scene was actually little changed from the visit of October
22nd, except that the Planetarium grounds were obviously neater and
cleaner. All the structural work is complete, so there were no heavy
machinery on the site. With the monocular I noticed odds and end
pieces of the Hayden Sphere not yet attached and some parts of the
Cube yet unfinished. The garage looked essentially complete with some
finishing touches to be completed.
The west gate was open and its guardhouse was crewed. Delivery
trucks constantly came and went all during my visit. The guard checked
papers and waved them thru. The public area is still at street level;
I was advised not to enter the gate. The east gate was locked but a
cement truck (a truck for mixing and carrying cement) was churning its
load on the circular drive. It was preparing concrete for the work in
the park, not the Planetarium.
The entire park was totally in turmoil from the renovations. It
may, if this pace keeps up, be at least livable by the time the
Planetarium opens. But there is no planned synchronism between the two
projects.
With the Sun hanging over the Planetarium by the early hour I
arrived there, about 13:20 EST, and the lack of foliage on the tress,
my views were severely impeded. Now last winter I had the advantage of
carefully selected trees and poles to shield me and my camera. These
were still in place.
The new impediment was the tall chainlink fence along the frontage
on 81st Street. Backlighted by the Sun is made a white-silver grillage
over my entire visual field! Even from the sheltering spots the
grillage crisscrossed over the scene. That's because the fence stood
between the Planetarium and most of these spots. Yet I did get several
shots of the place altho I suspect some will be spoiled by solar
intrusion.
With a bright Sun in the sky the Hayden Sphere stood out plainly
from the background of the Museum. The tripod of struts so cleverly
masked by the stone archway really give the illusion that the ball is
floating inside the cube.
I'm writing this essay on December 18th. Just before then I had
the chance to pass by the Museum at night. A bunch of New York
astronomers went to Central Park after that afternoon's Observing
Group meeting to check out the stars and an Iridium flare. Following
that I and an other member took a bus to Lincoln Square with a
transfer at the Museum.
So we stopped to see the Planetarium, which is right near the bus
stop. It was softly illuminated from the top. The Hayden Sphere so
much as hovered in space, like held by magnetic pressure or something!
The lighting is quite gentle, unlike the overly bright and inept
illumination on the old edifice. The designed lighting for the old
Hayden Planetarium was rather nice, with the dome and facade bathed in
art deco tints. But the last managers put up additional lamps that
trashed the historical aspect of the place. All the lamps in the new
facility are entirely hidden from the street and sky.
It was by coincidence that on the previous day, Monday the 6th of
December, the New York Daily News carried a two-page article about the
Planetarium. It was 'Fantastic voyage' by Sandra Gardner. detailing
the features of the completed facility. It included cutaway diagrams,
the same ones as issued here to fore, and shots of the interior from
the main floor. With the wide-angle lens she used the Hayden Sphere
looked positively humongous!
Also by coincidence the American Association of Variable Star
Observers issued in 1999 November its journal for the fall 1998
meeting. It had the abstract of my slide and viewgraph talk at that
meeting about the new Planetarium. Do note that by now the information
in that talk is quite a full year old. For example, the Planetarium
was then still structurally quite incomplete.
After about a halfhour at the site, near 14:00 EST, I left via the
8th Avenue bus. I wanted to check out the reillumination project in
Broadway north of Times Square. The business district mounted a crash
project to finish this work by the end of this year. Local darksky
advocates, particularly from New Jersey, went apeshit wild when the
project, which began in spring of 1999. They gave the H&M a windfall
of ridership as they thoroly documented and recorded the first poles
going up.
Then in summer of 1999 the whole job went into slo-mo. In October
and November progress resumed and I photoessayed it in the reach from
Herald Square to Times Square. The reach north to Columbus Circle I
hadn't yet examined. The bus ride gave me a grandstand view.
Essentially all the new poles are in place! A few lingering old
cobraheads remain in the upper fifties, but for the most part all of
Broadway is lighted by those moonlight starsafe lamppoles now silk-
screened onto the pillows of darksky leaders around the planet.
The ride was steady and quick, surprisingly so with the masses of
people flooding the streets in this holiday season. We're on the
upramp for the yearend -- millennium-end -- inundation of, gulp!, five
million visitors. Soon I was at Penn Station, where I hopped off to
return to work.
SESSION 56 - 2000 JANUARY 11
--------------------------
I made it in the 21st century. In case you missed it, it started
at midnight of January 1st. In fact, we had an incredible Times Square
celebration, possibly the largest ever in the Square for it. (Possibly
the celebration for the end of World War II was a bit bigger, but the
attendance records are not certain.)
I planned to visit the site on Monday, the 10th, I picked the
first cloudy day of convenience to avoid the hassles with the low and
brilliant Sun. So I prepared to leave for the Planetarium from work
and, ugh!, out my office window I saw a rainstorm blew into town. It
was a hard nasty downpour, not expected by the weather forecast of
that morning. I cancelled my plan and just dashed out to get lunch at
a closeby sandwich shop.
On the next day, Tuesday, the 11th, it was cloudy again. This time
there was no rain and I set off for the site at 12:30 EST. The one-
seat ride brought me to the Planetarium in quite ten minutes. As the
train swooshed into 81st Street station I saw that the south exit was
open. People were rushing thru the turnstiles to meet the train.
However, I was already near the north end of the train, the front as
it went uptown, so I exited at the 81st St stairs.
The day was cloudy with no Sun at all. Temperature was about 5C
with a brisk breeze. I had to keep my hands in the pockets when not in
use and my wool hat was pulled down over the ears.
The scene was, well, whistle clean! Just about all the material
and machinery in the park was gone! The park was still unfinished but
at least there was no blockage of my view this time. Even the lath
cages around the trees were removed. At the same time there was no one
working in the park. The place was empty. At the western end, beyond
the Planetarium grounds, construction trailers and some minor mess
remained.
The western gate was open and unstaffed. A worker heading for the
Planetarium did advise, at my request, that the public area is still
at the street. The circular drive is repaved on both the vehicle and
foot portions. It was done in allnew hexstone and cobbles.
The east gate was closed. This gate was uncrewed and workers came
and went without challenge or checks. They all had keys for the
padlock on the gate.
New lamppoles dotted the drive and the park. Being that it was
daytime they were turned off. So I can not tell for sure how they look
at night. They are the classical 'city park' type of lamp, with a
large 'acorn' globe and cage on top. They would in other towns be
heavily deprecated for the side and up spray of light.
Here in the City it is no longer acceptable to operate such
wasteful light. We evolved a cunning strategy for the parks and many
squares and plazas. We put up the outwardly nostalgic and historical
poles. But the bulb and globe are of a new design that minimizes
wasted light spray. The bulb is set high near the top of the globe so
the metal cap of the cage partly shields it. The globe is fluted or
ribbed to intercept outward rays and deflect them back to the ground.
The result is a soft glowing globe from a distance but with a
bright and even puddle of light around the pole. This extends about 4
or 5 meters in diameter from the pole, enough to touch the puddle of
the next lamp and thus light the paths and not the air. This lamp is
the de facto standard in the City for all Parks Department properties.
I can only assume, not yet having actually seen Roosevelt Park at
night since the renovation, that these ones here are also of the same
type.
The Planetarium itself is structurally complete. There remain, as
seen thru the monocular, odds and ends work to be done inside the
cube. Some temporary boards and scaffold lined the front of the cube.
The grounds around the Planetarium looked sweeped and cleaned, there
being very little rubbish or construction material around. Delivery
trucks were parked in the new garage. No vehicle came or went during
my visit.
The Hayden Sphere was receded opticly into the cube from the lack
of strong lighting from the Sun. From some angles, it almost vanished!
I had clear sightlines from almost any point around the park due to
both the lack of direct Sun and leafs on the trees. The chainlink
fence did not interfere at all. I could poke the camera thru the mesh
with no need to struggle against sunlight shining onto it.
Altho the Planetarium is not ready for full function, it was
opened on occasion for special visits. The biggest event was a New
year's Eve dedication ceremony for the Museum officials and some major
outside bigwigs. Also, journalists were taken on tours and their
stories ran in the local papers in late 1999.
None of the exhibits is really open, they being covered by tarps
for protection during the remaining stages of work. The timeline ramp
is finished. Visitors privileged to see the inside could walk along
it. The sky theater is finished and under test. The Zeiss projector
proved out perfectly.
The Planetarium crew is starting to move into its new offices
within the edifice as the rooms are cleared for occupancy.
Commissioning of the new Hayden Planetarium is on the board for mid or
late February of 2000, not at all overly 'late'. Over the 2-1/2 year
construction the slippage is only some 50 days.
Some readers noted that the lighting on the Planetarium was turned
on once in a while at night. They saw it as they passed by the Museum.
I haven't seen the place at night yet! I'll have to get in a night
visit, like before going to the February AAA lecture.
During the morning of today a member called me to tell of a new
story about the Planetarium just published. It's in New Yorker
magazine for January 17th by Paul Goldberger. Anyone following the
world of planetaria must read it. It's a peek at the development of
the ultimate design, the sphere-in-a-cube, of the Hayden Planetarium.
This article brings out several features of the City's outlook on
the world which may raise up severe reactions in rest-of-world
readers. Most notably in those mixed up in the flap over Stellafane in
1999.
Regarding the planetarium trade in the United States, it looks
both promising and hopeless. The New Hayden Planetarium is the last of
the great American planetaria of the 20th century, it being
structurally completed in December of 1999. It is also the first of
the great American planetaria of the 21st century, it opening for
service in a few weeks.
But in the overall scheme of astronomy culture in the United
States, this Hayden Planetarium is likely to be the ONLY great
planetarium of the 21st century! Or, perhaps more realisticly, the
next one will come in the latter half of this century. It is not a
pretty thought, yet from the general fabric of our profession in this
country, that's the pattern etched into it.
One point thatemerged from building this Hayden Planetarium is
that Zeiss may never sell an other large-size projector in any other
town in America again. Oh, we here will over the decades replace our
shining new model IX machine with newer ones. It just that of American
towns we here may well be the very last abode of that masterpiece. Oh,
there will certainly be new planetaria in rest-of-world along the
years. But no more Zeiss ones.
I have to clarify a bit. Note I said 'in other towns'. There is
right now the true prospect, altho not an actual certainty, that New
York will get in a few years its THIRD Zeiss planetarium. We got two
now, right? One here at Hayden and the other at Bronx High School of
Science.
The possible new third one is also in the Bronx! The Carl Sagan
Discovery Center in Norwood is building a 'space station' for space
and astronomy. In a later phase of its operation a planetarium and
observatory will be built there. And the likely choice of projector
may well be a Zeiss. Why? This is New York.
Way off-topic but what is this discovery center? Briefly, it's
really a new hospital for children's diseases. The patients will 'run'
the place like a spacebase to explore the universe. I presented a talk
about it at the AAVSO's fall meeting in October 1999, and summarized
that meeting in the January 2000 issue of EYEPIECE.
With nothing more to do I walked around at 13:15 to the front of
the Museum to enter the subway at the new south adit. Central Park
West was lined with school buses. Schoolkids gaggled on the sidewalk
and on the steps of the Museum. Against this crowd, there were very
few other people around. The streets here and along 81st Street were
pretty vacant.
The subway adit at 79th St, where 79th St would be if it continued
thru the Museum campus, looks quite the same as before, only newer and
cleaner. The long ramp to the fare control is redone in the same bland
white protoIND tile with no ornamentation. The lights, flooring,
handrails, and other fixtures are of the current style for transit
renovations.
The Museum's entry within the station is still walled off. You
have to go to the street to enter the Museum. The flooring at platform
level is a plain square tile gird without the pretty arcs woven into
the floor at the 81st Street end. So while the place is freshened up,
it still looks, well, blagh.
As I descended to the lower, downtown, platform, I saw that the
stair walls were fitted with a tile mosaic of blue whales in a sea-
blue ocean. I mean the type of animal is a 'blue whale, not that the
color of the figure is blue. It's white. This is attractive, yet so
artificial. It's just slapped up along the stair walls with no
transition across to the plain bathroom tile elsewhere in the station.
The West End local pulled in for my one-seat ride back to work.
Now that article in New Yorker I didn't see before my visit. I was
told of it by phone. I, before heading for my office, popped into a
newsie to get a copy of the magazine.
SESSION 57 - 2000 JANUARY 27
--------------------------
This is not a regular site visit to the Planetarium but I did stop
by it in the evening of Thrusday the 27th of January in 2000. This day
was one of the busier ones in the City for astronomy. With the opening
of the new Planetarium mere weeks away, the Museum began an allpoints
publicity caamaign for it. One of the projects was a chatshow with the
City's major astronomers and other notable people.
It hired MediaWorks, of SoHo, to do the show. You guessed; it
invited me as a 'major astronomer'! The shoots were on three days, the
27th thru the 29th. I figured to go on the 27th, being that I had to
stick around in the City for the Association's Recent Advances Seminar
on that evening. Fine, the producer said, come to the Museum at 16:30.
When I arrived a greeter from the video company took me and a
couple other show guests to a studio built into the fourth floor of
the Museum. We were put under makeup to remove shiny spots from our
faces. (Go figure, I thought I was picked because I was a shining
star.)
I didn't meet the other guests in this shoot, but they looked like
professionals or academics. We were prepped up separately and there
was no real chance to get acquainted. Anyway, the show was done for
each of us one by one.
I sat on a tall stool, like a draftman's or bookkeeper's stool,
against a white screen. The moderator sat off camera and asked chatty
questions about astronomy and the whole shibang. The intent was for us
to just give what ever answer came to mind first in what ever words
came to mouth first. ON, the first go around I did just that.
The moderator jumped up and flagged his crew to abort the shoot.
Obviously, this could not be taken too litterally. He reset
everything for a fresh run, with some more purposeful coaching. In all
we went thru about ten hindoos before the moderator was satisfied with
my episode. When all was done one of the crew led me back out to the
first floor, the path being so mazelike I could never have gotten out
on my own.
I can't say for sure that my piece will be included in the
Museum's promo, to be aired on local television in the weeks to come.
I figure if the outfit went thru the trouble of redoing my bit over
and over again it probably really wanted to get me in the final cut.
Outside, at quite 17:30 EST, it was dark. Being that I had to go
to 81st St for the crosstown bus, I might as well see what's with the
Planetarium at night. This would be my first night visit to the site.
The place was darkened except for area lighting inside. The Hayden
Sphere under the ambient lighting really looked like it was some
cosmic creature about to pop up out of the Cube. Thru the front
entrance hall, some leftover ladders and scaffolding were still
standing. The grounds were quiet. Only an occasional worker in winter
outerwear walked by.
The Planetarium is still recruiting for its astronomers. Several
Association members are onboard the staff in various ranks, ranging
from attendants to researchers to even the very director himself. This
unique feature of New York dates to the first days of the old Hayden
Planetarium in the mid 1930s. Here it was recognized ab initio that a
center for astronomy must be a genuine peerage union of the home and
campus astronomer. There can be no artificial lacuna between the
'professional' and 'amateur' realms of the profession, as there is in
so many other planetaria across the country. In town after town there
were bloody clashes between the home astronomy club and the
sternemeisters under the dome. Both camps suffered, with
disintegration of the club or deterioration of the planetarium.
Readers here will definitely remind me of the story in New York in
the 1970s and 1980s. Hell, they already did, which is why I'm pointing
all this out here. In that era, the management of the old Hayden
Planetarium rampaged out of astronomy. It revoked the facility from
the astronomy world and harassed the Association. Some commentators
made hay with the situation. Others saw it as a portent of their own
future.
It was exactly this bogus fracture of the profession into
antagonistic camps that visits heavy casualties on both. In the case
of the old Hayden, the rest of the campus astronomers shunned its
delegates, withheld favors, waved off invites for meetings, headhunted
its remaining better crew.
But in New York, what would have been a messy cultural and civic
disaster was turned aside. Man, it wasn't easy! Lawsuits, pitched
debates, costly studies, community unrest were chapters in the epic
'How the stars were won'.
The old Planetarium is today hunks of brick and scraps of ornament
in an exhibit, side by side with skulls and fossils.
The new Planetarium, its Hayden Sphere floating in the glass Cube,
tells the world that this profession will be for the 21st century a
enduring pattern in the fabric of the City. Its threads and sequins
are made of both campus and home astronomers.
Except for a couple special presentations to dignitaries, there
were no general preview tours of the new Planetarium. The staff is
busy into long hours to get the place pumped up for the grand opening
itself. So, folks, mark this date on your calendar: Saturday, the 19th
of February. Tickets for the skyshow within the Hayden Sphere are
about sold out by the time you read this photoessay. Tickets for the
exhibits and halls are freely available.
The Planetarium has already lined up hundreds of tours from March
thru the rest of the year! Astronomers -- from home and campus -- are
revving up buses, fueling planes, energizing trains to visit the new
Hayden Planetarium. A lowball -- and I mean under pessimist
circumstances -- the Planetarium will field IN THIS VERY YEAR ALONE 2-
1/2 million visitors. This excedes the lifetime attendance of most
other American planetaria, except for the very largest ones in the
major towns.
I must remind that the Planetarium is but one element of the
entire Rose Center for Earth and Space Science, occupying most of the
north flank of the Museum. The Planetarium itself, altho it has over
twice the gross area for exhibits as the old building, has the lesser
portion of the Center's offerings. The other halls total about 8
metric acres, equivalent to eight floors in one of the towers of the
World Trade Center. So when you come to the Planetarium don't miss
this other stuff.
It snowed a few days ago. The Museum in plowing the sidewalks
around the campus, pushed mounds of snow against the chainlink fence.
Then the temperature fell -- it was about -10C on this evening -- so
the snow froze into clinker ice. I had to kick out footholds in the
ice to get up close to the fence.
The park looked pretty much ready to open. At least there were no
obvious remanents of material or equipment laying about. The new lamps
were already turned on. Yes, they are the star friendly ones I
described in the last photoessay. The more distant lamps were gentle
glowing globes while the closer ones gave off a bright illumination.
With snow on the ground, the illumination was amplified to the point
that there were very few really dark spots in the park. The color is,
at least to me, an aqua tint, not fully blue or green and certainly
not white.
The air was definitely chilly. A nasty breeze flowed over the
street. I had a couple shots left in my camera. I did some
snapshooting in the afternoon at work. I emptied the camera at the
Planetarium using ambient light exposure. Then I walked to the busstop
at 81st Street and Central Park West.
This bus route during January was fitted with a brandnew fleet of
vehicles. These are articulated buses, with a bellows joining the
front and read sections. Now, I'm hardly any great fan of buses but
these were sort of weird. In a minute or two one of these snaked down
81st Street and slithered into the busstop. The thing was half again
longer than a regular one-piece bus, something like 18 meters long!
One thing I noticed right away was that the length of the bus
could put a rider rather far from the doors. I squeezed my way to the
rear door. Despite the longer more capacious vehicle, it was filled to
the rafters with riders. At each stop there was a much longer dwell
while riders edged down the aisle to the door to get out.
The bellows thingie about 2/3 of the way back seemed to be an
allway joint. The two sections rocked and rolled in all directions as
the bus careered thru Central Park to the east side of Manhattan. On
the floor there was a round plate which turned this way and that with
the motion of the bus. And on this plate, right within its edges, were
four regular bus seats, two on each side facing inward with their
backs against the bellows! They, when the bus was stretched out
straight, lined up with the other seats in the solid sections. Riders
in these seats must have gotten seasick.
At Lexington Av I bailed out, this stop being next to several
eateries where I would rustle up some supper. I feasted on a jumbo
bagel and shmultz (for the remote reader, this is a puffy doughy roll
with a hole in the middle and stuffed with cream cheese) and coffee.
This place is newish, maybe a year old, and is very popular for a
quick bite. It's mostly a pastry & bakery shop. .
It now being near to 18:30 I walked back to Park Avenue for the
Recent Astronomy Seminar. This, at first, looks like a roundtable
free-for-all of home astronomers debating the mysteries of the
universe. Many astronomy clubs have such a group and they are quite a
draw for their members. The one in New York is actually a bit unusual.
The members tend to be more wisely in astronomy and they use the
academic and technical journals as sources.
The Seminar was about beginning when I stepped into the office.
Some ten members were gearing up for discussing recent news from
magazines, newspapers, journals, and Internet. Most of the topics
bantered about at this session were sparked by items in the Science
Times section of the NY Times. Sessionaries (I made that one up)
brought in other material to elaborate on the newspaper articles.
Normally the Seminar lasts an hour and a half, aftter which
several of the sessionaries repair to a nearby coffee shop for supper.
Today was special. The Association's newsletter EYEPIECE had to be
mailed out tonight. It fell out that the issue was received from our
printer a bit late and it was convenient to do the mailing at the
Seminar in the stead of calling a crew separately for this task.
With about eight members staying for the mailing the work went
thru quickly. Some applied the address labels, others folded, others
stapled. Finally the postage stamps were stuck on. Until a year ago we
had to lick or wet the stamps, a sloppy and tedious chore. We now use
only the stickon stamps which come on glossy sheets much like the
address labels.
In anticipation of the mailing we winded down the Seminar at
20:00; a couple folk did leave then. With the remaining crew the
entire half-thousand issues were ready for mailing by 20:45! These
issues, being first-class mail, we dumped into a mailbox on the next
corner from the office.
No, we long long ago gave up on the bulk-rate mailing. The hassle
and nuisance of dealing with the postoffice were so irritating that we
really had trouble assembling a crew to put up with them. We
eventually just went to first-class mailing and bypassed the
postoffice completely. With the issues in the mailbox the mailing is
utterly finished.
Some of the crew did take supper, but I was by now a bit tired. I
went straight home, after a very busy day of astronomy.
SESSION 58 - 2000 FEBRUARY 15
---------------------------
With the Hayden Planetarium opening its doors on Saturday the 19th
of february, this is my final visit to the site in this photoessay
series. This visit, on Tuesday 15 February 2000, is also the only
visit with other astronomers (or anyone else, for that matter). Three
other Association members came along. And it's the only visit to the
INSIDE of the new facility!
Two major events occurred at the beginning of February of 2000.
FIrst, the Museum's website, www.amnh.org, was completely rebuilt to
highlight the Rose Center. That's the large central picture on the
homepage, with the ball-in-cube motif. The site has a detailed
description of the Rose Center with pictures. The site does require a
fast and wide Internet tie because of the heavy graphics and
animations. To view the tour of the Rose Center you have to install
the Ipix plugin, which can be downloaded from this site by a link.
As glitzy as the Museum's new website is, I was terribly
disappointed with it. OK, the Rose Center IS a stupendous addition to
the Museum. Probably, due to geographic constraints, it is the very
final major addition to the campus. But it's not everything. The
homepage banners the Rose Center and only two other features. One is
an exhibit of the Millennium Time Capsule. The other is one on body
art. Everything else about the immense and huge and enormous American
Museum of Natural History is buried in a thin row of tabs at the
bottom of the page!
After swimming around in the Rose Center section for awhile I gave
up. I couldn't find a floor plan, directory of exhibits, not even a
briefing to organize a visit. I tried the construction section. Only a
couple of small pictures. I grant that the Museum itself made a far
more comprehensive photoessay of the works than I did, if by no more
means than the birdhouse on the grounds. But if it for some weird
reason hired my pictures the panorama of the project would have been
altogether more majestic.
The other event is that to give the new Planetarium a thoro
stress-test, it allowed its own members to preview the place. Museum
members could pick up tickets for free to visit the Rose Center and
take in a skyshow. Over the past two weeks, a couple dozen Association
members, who are also Museum members, did get their first looks. At
the Recent Astronomy Seminar of February 10th and the Observing Group
meeting of February 12th members who saw the Planetarium offered
tickets to those who did not yet see it.
After opening, tickets cost $9.50 for adults, somewhat less for
children and seniors. If you get tickets by phone, mail, or Internet,
you'll be charged this price plus the suggested donation to enter the
Museum. The total is then $19 per adult. This sounds like an
incredibly stiff price to see a planetarium show. it is.
Yet thruout the entire history of the Hayden Planetarium the price
of a skyshow ticket was always on the high side compared to regular
cinemas. When the place first opened, the damage was 50 cents -- and
this was during the Depression -- about a hour's pay for most working
people. And it was twice the price of a cinema ticket!
You can mitigate the damage by first entering the Museum by what
ever donation you are comfortable with. It must accept what you offer
despite the intimidating signs. Then get the separate skyshow ticket
at the Planetarium's frontdesk. Note, too, that higher categories of
Museum membership bypass the suggested donation and pay only the
specific $9.50 fee for the skyshow.
An other way to ease the pain is to buy a CityPass. This is mainly
for tourists to give entree to six major attractions of the City.
These are the Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern
Art, World Trade Center, Empire State Building, and Intrepid Air-Sea-
Space Museum. This costs $28, substantially less than the sum of the
individual admissions. Get this pass from a tour or travel agent
before your visit to the City or at the ticket desk at one of the
sites after you get here. Note well that CityPass does NOT include the
skyshow; you must still buy that ticket at the Planetarium ticket
desk.
So I got a pass for the 13:00 skyshow on Tuesday, the 15th of
February in 2000. I took the whole afternoon off from work, being that
I wanted to check out an other exhibits and then go tend to my
astronomy class at the Association headquarters. I prepared for this
special visit by having a new roll of film in my camera and an extra
roll in my pocket.
I arrived at the Planetarium by the two-seat ride and emerged into
a crisp cool brilliant sunny day. Temperature was about 5C with a
refreshing breeze. The Sun was blazing. For the preview the two gates
were open for foot traffic, while the park remained fenced off.
And so for the first time in over 2-1/2 years I walked down the
circular drive to the front apron of the Planetarium. I waited for the
other members. It wa now quite 13:10 EST. I passed the time by
photographing the structure at various close angles.
In the new apron were some of the bronze swirls or 'galaxies' that
were dug out of the old apron. They were originally a gift from an
artist who was thrilled by a laserium show and, presumably, arranged
the galaxies in some certain way. I can't believe any regard for the
original scheme was held in placing the swirls into the new apron. But
there they are.
One thing some purists will protest against. The headsign on the
new Planetarium proclaims it as the Rose Center. The Hayden
Planetarium name is on the wall next to the arch, lower down and in
smaller letters. I would think that virtually everyone will call this
particular building the Hayden Planetarium and know it as an element
within the Rose Center. In fact, just the sky theater in the Hayden
Sphere -- which is now called the Great Sphere -- is the actual Hayden
Planetarium. Even the main floor with the exhibits is named for an
other patron (I forget),, the So-&-So Hall of the Universe.
Soon, like maybe on the following train, Ken Brown, Tom Clabough,
and Dennis Ferguson ambled down the drive. We entered thru the new
main doors under the stone arch
The greeter advised that the place is not open to the public yet,
because there were lots of passers by who saw the place 'open' and
tried to enter. We showed our tickets and were let thru to the
interior hall. The coat check was downstairs, as was the giftshop.
Right away, probably from my eye for construction, I saw this
Planetarium was far from complete. Everywhere there were workers
fixing, assembling, adjusting. Safety tape was still strung around
certain areas, certain stairs were still closed. The giftshop was
still bare of its goods. Workers were busily unpacking crates to fill
the shelfs but they were no way near to receiving customers.
From the coatroom we proceded into the main floor, one story below
the street, now called Hall of the Universe. We wanted to explore the
exhibits here but the ushers shooed us to an escalator for the
skyshow. From the escalator, which brought us back to street level, I
saw a veritable battalion of ushers all shepherding people around the
floor. By the end of my visit I would see something like fifty floor
walkers in all parts of the Planetarium.
This is astounding. Other halls of the Museum have a couple of
ushers, typicly at the entry doors. But 50? Assuming a modest salary
of $25,000 each -- without benefits or perks -- that's already a cool
one million in payroll per year. If I allow for professional and
support crew, at reasonably higher salaries, the payroll, raw base
payroll, of the Planetarium is at least $5 million per year.
Let's see what happens. To meet just this minimum estimate of
payroll how many paying customers must the Planetarium host each year?
First off the revenue per visitor is NOT $9.50. With discounts and
children rates the averaged out rate is more like $8 per person. Thus
right away the Planetarium needs 625,000 paying visitors per year.
The skyshow will not be filled completely each time. Say the
theater hosts 312 over all the year. Then there must be 2,000 shows in
the year. The Planetarium will be open most days, but allow for some
closings, so let's have 350 working days. That's 5 to 6 shows every
working day.
This is not a wild estimate after all. However, these shows fill
only 2-1/2 hours of the day (20 minutes each with 10 minutes change
over). Besides salary there are other running costs: supplies,
contract services, utilities, repairs, travel, hosting guests, fees
and honoraria, crew benefits and perks, equipment rental, temporary
crew, replacements, and more. I have no idea what this can amount to.
Let's say that because my salary estimate is on the low side, that the
rest is thrice this salary. The Planetarium needs to take in $15
million per year.
This bumps up the shows to fifteen per day! Yet this is more like
the proposed schedule. Shows will run for 7 or 8 hours of the day. And
these fifteen shows will serve thrice the visitors I noted above, or
1,875,000. This, too, is surprisingly close to the low estimate of the
number of paying visitors actually expected. Toss in the free or low
rate customers (school children, mostly) and we end up with a
potential annual visitorship of 2.5 million.
Do understand that all of the above is my very own guessitmate and
there is nothing what so ever official from the Planetarium.
I also saw that this main floor communicated with the rest of the
Rose Center halls without impedence. In fact, you can 'visit the
Planetarium' with no extra fee once inside the Museum. By this I mean
you can explore the Hall of the Universe (which on this visit I would
miss completely) but not enter the skyshow itself. This is actually
how many other planetaria built into a museum do things. The exhibits
are in the open halls but the very dome is under a separate extra
admission.
Maybe because this was a preview and we were guinea pigs in a
shakedown cruise of the place, no one gave us or referred us to
litterature about the Rose Center. No guide brochure, description of
features, floor plan were evident any where in the Planetarium.
Without preparation we had little notion of what to expect. We ended
up flowing with the crowd under direction from the floor walkers.
Way later, as I was leaving, I stopped at an information table set
up in the main entry hall. No, no one there had any good litterature.
From the top of the escalator, on a level with the street but in
the back (south) side of the Cube, we were vectored onto elevators. By
now a good crowd of a couple hundred folk accumulated. The floor were
roped off into cattle chutes and we bumped forward every several
seconds.
The elevator took us up three more floors to the forebay -- for
want of a gentler term -- of the sky theater. There is one escalator
continuously loaded with visitors and three elevators working in relay
to move the crowd toward the Hayden Sphere.
Greeters in this forebay handed out what looked like souvenir
postcards, which I slipped into my pocket to inspect later. One of the
other members saw it was a 'passport' allowing the bearer to travel
anywhere in the universe. The face was a wiggle picture of the
heavens. Each angle of view emphasized Earth, solar system, and so on,
to the whole universe itself. You are supposed to sign the back to
validate it! For me, this was a mighty corny thing. And the greeter
never said anything about it. She just shoved them into our hands.
The forebay is spacey-spooky with an authoritatively-voiced
narration that after a few repeats got pretty annoying. Scenes from
the skyshow were displayed on two monitors near the ceiling. Once in a
while the narration faltered or broke off, a glitch requiring
attention before opening day.
Every so often the narration over the PA warned against eating,
drinking, or smoking in the sky theater. It did not say anything about
camera flash! One of the great nuisances of any planetarium is the
bloke who tries to take a photo of the show. Result: a blinding
lightning bolt in everyone's eyes. To mess up matters more, the
website specificly encourages handheld cameras with flash within the
Museum, with no exception claimed for the Hayden Sphere.
The forebay filled up with people. Soon we got to sort of goofing
around. We swopped jokes and made wisecracks about our 'fate' inside
the Hayden Sphere. The sky theater holds 430ish people, yet the mass
of visitors seemed far larger. The effect was all from the confined
and dark quarters we were packed into.
After a many minute dwell time here the doors to the Hayden Sphere
were opened and we all streamed inside. Now from previous member
visits we learned that the best seats were the second or third row
directly opposite the entrance doors. That is, we should hustle
straight across the floor, on top of the hidden Zeiss projector, and
take the 2nd or 3rd row of seats.
This is a change from the old dome, whose best seats were the 2nd
from the rim in back of the projection console. The selection of best
seats is a compromise between having the Zeiss machine in your face
(sitting in the first row) and suffering severe perspective distortion
on the dome (sitting near the rim).
We nestled in comfortable seats, well cushioned and with vinyl
trimming. They were loose enough to squirm without binding the clothes
or knocking into the adjacent guest. One hyped up feature is that the
seats rumble to simulate rocket thrusts, stellar explosions, and the
like. I'll tell you this. It's more of a gentle tremor, like that felt
in a building next to a subway or a large ventilating machine. No, the
seat does not rock and bounce. No, there are no seat belts. i had my
monocular and Ken had regular binoculars. He, Tom, and Dennis were
later going to the Winter Garden, in the World Finance Center, to see
Mercury at sunset.
The dome was washed in sky blue light. It was nice and clean! the
old Planetarium dome was downright filthy from lack of cleaning. With
everyone seated, the doors were shut, and sky darkened. The narration
for the show was by Tom Hanks, who sort of reminded me of the
legendary Fred Hess in voice.
He announced the uprising of the Zeiss machine. Spotlights turned
on to illuminate 'It' emerging from its lair in full blossom. Then it
started to do its thing on the sky. The opening scene is the full
force sky with a dropdead realistic Milky Way. This looked as if it
were made from the Lund Observatory mosaic. It looked by eye like the
Milky Way of darksky sites I went to on various eclipse trips. The
band was richly textured with the dust and nebulae all over it! Thru
the monocular I found many of the clusters that dot the Milky Way.
Ken, too, with his binoculars spotted many deepsky features.
The stars from the Zeiss are dropdead pinpoints. And they twinkle.
In the monocular they remained very small dots, not obvious discs. One
difference I found was that the star magnitudes seemed compressed as
compared to the real sky. This made the really faint constellations
more visible and tempered the brilliance of Canopus and Sirius.
I can not walk you thru the entire show, but do offer general
comments. The animations are truly spectacular. The planets, stars,
the Orion Nebula look like you really are flying past them. Everything
moves in 3D with perspective, phases, foreshortening. I did notice
that the planets, on the swing out of the solar system, were a little
soft. Probably this is due to the fact these were generated on the fly
by computer and there's a limit to the pixelation that still allows
for fast motion. Nevertheless, the effect is good.
There is no lecturer -- or even a console for one -- in the Hayden
Sphere. What happens to the arrow pointer? There isn't any! In the
stead a crosshair is pinned on the target of attention! Actually in
this show most of the action takes place over the entrance doors or in
the zenith. There was little cause to squirm around in the seats
except to see the planets loom out of the horizon behind you.
Altho immense pains must be been suffered to make the images as
real as possible, some shortfalls were evident. Galaxies looked too
stylized, with powder-puff spiral arms. Nebulae in the Zeiss sky were
merely generic patches in the monocular. This does not mean to say the
overall effect is dulled; it isn't. You'll come away thoroly awed.
This show, now called a Space Show, lasted about twenty minutes.
The audience is let out a second door and onto a rectilinear ramp.
This ramp was not highlighted in the promos like the timeline ramp.
Yet it is equally important. This ramp hugs the perimeter of the
Planetarium and has stations for the power-of-ten. This is a classical
exhibit featured in many science museums. Each station, about a
ha'meter long on the ramp, has the Hayden Sphere being so many meters
across. In comparison the little picture on the ramp's rail, or a
little ball mounted on it, represents such-&-such thing in the
universe.
It's hard NOT to engage the Hayden Sphere in this place! It's, uh,
humongous. And there is it right in front of you all the time. It's
the largest spherical structure the public can walk around inside of.
There are vastly larger spheres, like for soybean oil or liquefied
gas, but you can't occupy them. Some readers here noted that the
Perisphere was larger but no one seems to know for sure.
Here were more of the incomplete parts of the facility. Some of
the panels were missing, replaced by blank slips. Panels didn't match
up squarely, leaving sharp edges to catch fingers on. The railing in
places had burrs or raw edges. A couple of the little balls were
missing! Only their studs were left. I don;t know if these balls were
still in preparation or if some nefarious previous visitor liberated
them.
The balls were surprisingly bland, just colored wood, plastic,
metal globes. One for a globular cluster had nothing at all to
simulate its stellar makeup. I would have liked to see a mass of
fiberoptics with twinkling tips. One for a star (I forget which) had
no granulation, spots, or even an internal light. It was just a plain
old yellowish plastic ball. Uf you were expecting the mother of George
Awad models, fuggedabouddit.
At an early station right after leaving the skyshow, I felt
uprising heat from under the railing. At first I took it to be some
allusion to temperature or energy for the instant object. Closer
inspection revealed that the warm air was nothing more than space
heating. Along the entire length of the Power-of-Ten ramp are heating
vents. Only certain ones were running during my visit.
I was surprised at the erratic legibility of the captions and
signs, a feature I would find all over the Planetarium later. Some
were nice and contrasty and easily seen au courant along the ramp.
Others were in light colors which were hard to separate from the light
colored plate they sat on. Later I would find signs with translucent
backing that under certain ambient light camuflaged the lettering,
video screens with too tiny writing, and panels set so low I had to
stoop to see.
By the same token (hey, so I'm dated) I do have to say with
pleasure that of the material I did read, all was competent, accurate,
correct. I found nothing that was unduly exaggerated or faked or
mistaken. Hence, to the extent that the captioning is fixed up you'll
get a good nourishment of astronomy information.
This ramp covered the range of, if I recall properly, 1e23 meters
to 1e-19 meters, or from the entire universe to some subsubatomic
particle. It wrapped around the east, north, west and part of the
south sides of the Cube for around 100 meters.
At the end was the entrance to the Big Bang Theater. The
Planetarium dared not to call it the Creation Theater, for the
allusion to the emotional belief that the universe was fashioned
within a week or so. As people trickled down the Power-of-Ten ramp
they bunched up at the entry door of the theater in the lower part of
the Hayden Sphere. Ushers there collected about thirty people and let
them inside.
The Big Bang Theater is one of the more pumped up expectations
bannered by the Museum. It's supposed to show how the universe began.
I found it to be a big blip. The room was a darkened arena about 6
meters across. In the middle was a circular pit ringed bu a leaning
rail. About thirty people could stand comfortably around this pit,
which has no name but I call it the Big Bang Bowl.
Jodie Foster narrates this show, as being an expert in cosmology
from her trip to Vega and subsequent pregnancy. She explains how the
universe was a dot of pure energy that exploded. Then a loud
firecracker noise issues from the bowl. A bright dot appears and
'explodes' out all over the bowl. The blobs morph into smaller ones,
then into galaxies. She concludes with a reminder to examine the
Cosmic Pathway -- the timeline ramp -- when we leave. The whole
shibang lasts only a fat minute.
This is to me such a silly exhibit. It's like something in a mid
American museum. Oh, yes, there is computer generated action, yet it
comes off, well, ech. What's more, the exit door was open for most of
this presentation. This filled the room with bothersome outside light.
This door should be closed until the bigbang is complete.
The timeline ramp, the Cosmic Pathway, spirals from the Big bang
theater to the ground level floor for about 100 meters. Each step,
assumed to be a ha'meter, represents 65 million years. One centimeter
is 1.3 million years.
Atop the outer wall are stations for each billion years. On the
face of the wall are pictures for the objects and events at that
spot's place in history. The distance from Earth, or the lookback
time, is indirectly cited in the redshift of the feature. This is
plain Z, not Z+1. Occasionally there's a touchscreen on top of the
wall. Many were out of action.
The others I found hard to read in the brilliant ambient light.
Remember that the Planetarium is fully exposed to the outside with its
ice-clear glass walls. It's like watching television while facing a
skylighted window. Screens facing away from the glass walls suffered
from direct light falling on them.
The panels on the face of the outer wall were too low for grownups
to read. Either they have to stand back and be intervened by other
visitors or they must stoop or lean at the wall. It evens out I
suppose. Children can not comfortably operate the screens on top of
the wall.
This ramp is a bit unusual. The presently assessed age of the
universe under the standard bigbang is 13 billion years. This is not a
firm fact but a working number to guide observations and studies.
Please understand that nothing is mentioned about the Guth inflation
stage; everything is based on a straight Friedmann model.
It's plausible that the age will be revised in the years to come.
To account for this prospect, the timeline ramp panels can be refitted
with scenes appropriate for the new age assessment. The physical
length of the ramp is fixed; the distribution of the scenes along it
will fit the new scale.
There were here misaligned panels, missing panels, rough edges on
fittings, light leaks around pictures, and loose marker signs. On the
floor of the ramp were two technicolor bands running the whole length.
I don't know what these were for and there was no information about
them.
I noticed that many people, having seen the skyshow, the Power-of-
Ten ramp, and the Big Bang Theater, were tired. They skipped down this
Cosmic Pathway like an ordinary exit without examining the stations.
At the end of the ramp, at floor level, was a plastic cell
containing a [Jodie Foster's?] human hair. The thickness, 1/10
millimeter, stands for the entire 13,000 years of human recorded
history!
Let's back up a bit. The fee for the skyshow covers four major
exhibits of the Planetarium, a fact not well pointed out. Everyone who
hasn't seen the place assumes they get only the 20-minute skyshow for
that $9.50. You actually see the skyshow first, then the Power-of-Ten
ramp, the Big Bang (yes, it's two words here) Theater, and lastly the
Cosmic Pathway. Only after you step off of the Cosmic Pathway at the
present era do you return to the free-range area of the Planetarium.
While the skyshow is 20 minutes and the Big bang boom is only a
minute or two, you can spend all the time you want on the ramps. No
one rushes you. It can take a half hour on each if you study several
of the stations, thus easily filling an hour and a half for that
ticket.
While on the ramps, and probably due to my engineering career, I
saw no way to escape from them in the event of fire. There's no way to
quickly erect rescue ladders to the ramps from a fire brigade that
arrived on the scene. The Cosmic Pathway isn't so terrible. Ushers can
urge people downward to the floor and then to safety.
The Power-of-Ten ramp, being much higher and with no direct exit
to safety, is an other issue. It ties at each end to the Hayden
Sphere, the most likely place for a fire from the mass concentration
of electricity and occupancy by visitors. It may be feasible in a
given situation to open both gates of the Big bang Theater, rush
people thru it onto the Cosmic Pathway, and then march them to the
floor. But that's over a hundred meter walk under a panic state.
Within the sky theater people could be released thru the entrance
gate. But that puts them in the constricted forebay with apparently
only elevators to move them away. I didn't notice alternative stairs.
I saw nothing to prevent a visitor with no skyshow ticket from
walking UP the timeline ramp all the way back to the exit of the Big
Bang theater. I can't imagine that an usher will stop from traveling
backwards in time. The Big Bang Theater is as far as you could go. It
is an obvious exit and an usher there will remind you as he moves
people from inside onto the ramp.
Somewhere in the bigbang I lost the other members. They probably
went ahead while I studied some of the Power-of-Ten panels. I hope
they did spot Mercury. The sky was ice blue with a blinding Sun. So
the night should have been perfect for seeing the little planet over
the Hudson River.
While on the ramps I examined the glass walls. The glass is
utterly transparent. Someone explained a few days ago that this glass
is a special blend that is iron-free. I don't know what iron has to do
with the transparency of the this glass, but it is, well, clear. It
also seems to stifle reflections. The Sun, as dazzling as it was, made
only annoying reflections, not really bright enough to avert the
sight, just a nuisance.
There is no way to modulate the ambient light from the sky or Sun.
No blinds, louvers, mirrors, tinting temper the incoming light. What
ever flows into the Cube, that's what you must get around with. I
hazard that at night under artificial controllable lamps the
illumination must be well executed. I just haven't seen the facility
at night yet. By day, expect anything from eye-blinding direct Sun in
summer months to gloomy gray under storms.
I also saw the patio atop the garage. This is still under work and
not accessible to anyone other than workers. It is not reachable
directly from the Planetarium. In fact there is a safety barrier of a
pool between it and the west wall of the Planetarium. An usher
explained that the patio opens sometime in the late spring.
There's a heavy psychological effect of the Planetarium. It
communicates with the outside thru the walls. the glass being so
clear, it seems like you can just walk out to the street. You see the
towers across 81st Street and Central Park. I suppose when the place
is humming with visitors the people outside will visually interact
with the people on the ramps.
This sets the Planetarium quite apart from others. Not even the
Air & Space Museum in Washington DC accomplishes this, despite its
massively huge glass walls. That museum fronts the vast empty space of
the Mall. There is no 'town' around it at all. Adler and Griffith
stand far off from their towns as if fearing to touch them. Fels and
Boston Hayden are buried within their museums with no view of the town
around them. Here in New York, whether by design or happy spinoff, the
stars are united with the City, to emphasize that here, and only here,
the universe is the upper half of the cityscape.
Now alone with the others long separated from me, I wanted to see
the main, lower, floor. Ushers barred my, and others's, way for the
floor was momentarily closed. Workers were moving crates and tubs of
gear into it. I reached this Hall of the Universe by an incredibly
rattling stairway that clanked under my feet. Ushers explained it has
to be tightened later.
Thruout the Planetarium I hit, litterally, upon many fixtures and
fittings that snagged my fingers. Many were in structures not yet
complete, with missing covers or exposed bolts and sharp parts. Others
seemed to be design flaws. Some banisters, for example, are in segments
with gaps. The standoffs and fittings at the gaps easily caught my
hands.
So now on the ground level I took a good look at the Hayden Sphere
and the ramps wrapping around it. The people were like toys trudging
along them. Wait! Where was this scene played out before in the City?
Yes! This is a page right from the book of Norman Bel-Gedde! He
designed many of the pavilions of the last great World's Fair on
Earth, back in 1939. His theme was immense massive smooth rounded
structures that belittled the visitors, sort of a 'big brother' school
of architecture.
Bel-Gedde in the planetarium world is a whole other character.
he's the guy who wanted to tear down the Hayden Planetarium! Under
Robert Moses in 1941 he did a study of the still-new Planetarium to
improve it. His report is now a treasured relic among planetarium
groupies.
Bel-Gedde was unversed in astronomy. He, for instance, thought
comets fly from nebula to nebula. And he was turned off by pictures of
the celestial wonders which were only in black-&-white. In his report
he made several proposals for rejuvenating the Planetarium, including
replacing it with a whole new facility.
Did Polshek, architect of this here and now Hayden Planetarium,
slyly embed Bel-Gedde in this structure? Could Bel-Gedde from his
grave be whispering, 'See? I told you how to fix up that place'.
Anyway, there's the Hayden Sphere in the flesh.
With the main floor closed, how can I get back to the coat check
on that floor? Ushers steered me to a most roundabout trek to a far
out-of-way stairs. Once on the lower level the way was clear to get my
coat and saddle up.
By now, 15:30, I was tired, but not completely so. My camera was
about exhausted of its film. I did shoot nearly a full 36-frame roll!
I passed up the other halls of the Rose Center. I can see them anytime
for they were open for many months already. There was an exhibit I had
to check out and this is one you must include with your own visit to
the Planetarium.
Directly across the street on 77th Street from the Museum is the
'other' museum, the New-York Historical Society.
This is housed in, compared to the colossus of the Museum, a
'shack' that costs five dollars to look around in. However, in
February, March, and April there is one exhibition that makes the
whole inconceivable phaenomenon of the Hayden Planetarium
comprehensible. It's 'New York on the Brink' on the second floor.
Against any Museum hall, even the older ones outside the Rose
Center, this show is deader than a doorknob. A bunch of matted and
framed photos, pictures, posters. A couple cases of artifacts. And a
cast-off subway turnstile.
It offers glimpses into the New York of a generation ago in the
mid 1970s. If you are under 30 years of age, this is the New York your
parents reared you in. In those innocent years of your youth there was
a cataclysm in the making. If you are 40ish or older, you may well
remember those years. You were in your first career or marriage. You
may even have fled from the City in that era.
Within the living memory of most readers in this room, the City
sank into a veritable isolated depression that spawned the orthodox
image of New York as the Nemesis of home astronomy. And, to many, of
campus astronomy, too. Most of the surly and snide comments about
astronomy in New York -- that farcical fantasy of fools! -- have their
roots in the 1970s.
And some shyster leaders of the home astronomy world still today
feed their flock this swill as manna.
There was, yes, really a time when the police department had to
beg for new horses, the West Side Highway was a jogger's path and
picnic patio, the subways were billboards for graffiti, the Bronx was
the American Soweto, peasants staged sitins in firehouses.
While the entire show can be exploited in a ha'hour, there are two
pictures you as a home astronomy advocate should study. One is a scene
of Sheep Meadow in Central Park from 1979. The whole place was a
parched caked gulch. No one came here: too hard for picnic, too pitted
for playing, too dusty for sunbathing. At night thugs roved over it.
Central Park was in other places just as dismal and disgusting.
Right below it is an other picture of the same Sheep Meadow in
1993 at the early stages of the renaissance of the City. It's quite
like it is today, all green and great. Within a year this rescued
greensward would be host to an other renaissance in the City.
In July 1994 some five thousand townsfolk flowed in this very
Sheep Meadow to study the bangmarks of comet Shoemaker-Levy-9. Then,
in September of 1995, more thousands of townsfolk flowed into this
very Sheep Meadow for an awesome celebration. A celebration other
towns dare only to hope for their grandchildren.
They celebrated the return of the stars to the City. I mean the
real stars in the real sky. This was the first American Urban Star
Fest. Since then, in the grandest of manner, this devastitas, icon of
urban death, transglorified into a hallowed ground among the teeming
masses of home astronomers. It is on this field of friendly stars
where the seeds are sown which in other fields under other stars will
bear the fruits of victory.
The American Urban Star Fest is one of the palpable tangible
resurrections of astronomy in the City. The new Rose Center with the
Hayden Planetarium is an other. And this is only the beginning. The
century is young. The universe is vast. From New York you will see it
all.
If your were a child in the City in those dark years of the 1970s,
you may recall your father taking you up the subway steps at 81st
Street station, walking down the curving path, to the grill gates of
the Hayden Planetarium. Its insides then reflected the odor of the
streets outside.
Today you can take the hand of your child. Get off at 81st Street
from a brandnew beautiful train. Walk up the steps of a brandnew
beautiful station.
Stop. Look at the brandnew beautiful Central Park with its soft
welcoming starsafe lamppoles. See a kilometer to the south the starry
fields of Sheep Meadow. Gaze along brandnew beautiful Central Park
West under the moonlight of its starsafe lamps.
Now steer your child down that curved brandnew beautiful path.
Pass by the brandnew beautiful Theodore Roosevelt Park. Arrive at the
grand arch of the brandnew beautiful Hayden Planetarium. If your kid
asks if it was always like this, take the two of you to that other
exhibit.
And so, what more can I say? 'Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, boys
and girls, welcome to the American Museum Hayden Planetarium ... .'
SESSION 59 - 2000 MAY 10
----------------------
This is not a regular photoessay; that series was completed with
my visit ot the Planetarium on 2000 February 15. That essay is session
#58. What I have here is some tying up of loose ends which I collected
since February 15th.
These additional notes will help you during your visit to the new
Hayden Planetarium, which in its first weeks of operation is welcoming
over 10,000 visitors a day. The items here are gathered from several
visits I made to the Planetarium since opening day, 2000 February 19,
in the course of my astronomy business and personal curiosity. To
these are added comments relayed to me by other astronomers who
visited the Planetarium.
Remember I was annoyed that there was no floor plan or visitor
guide? Now it seems there's a dedicated rail spur into the Museum just
for delivery of such litterature. Guides and plans for the Rose Center
are EVERY WHERE. The general plan for the entire Museum is a
newsletter-size foldout issued in several languages. The nonEnglish
versions are slimmer than the English one but are laid out in easier
to read style. If you know any of the other languages you'll do better
with that plan because some of the Museum halls are dimly lighted. If
you know none of the foreign languages try the Italian or Spanish map.
The words are more similar to Latin, which as an astronomer you'll
readily pick up the meaning.
The Rose Center guide, only in English at the desk I got mine at,
is more like a bus or train timetable foldout. With lots of nice
pictures and clear maps, it shows what's where thruout the premises.
There's a caution about the floor numbers in the Museum. They can be
confusing. The entire Museum is set into a shallow basin hollowed out
of Manhattan Square. The floor you land on by walking down the walks
or drives from 77th St, Central Park West, or, now, the Planetarium
entrance is the First Floor, even tho it's one level below the
surrounding grade. Under this, entered from the IND station, is the
Lower Level. This is the floor for the Hall of the Universe, the
exhibit arena under the Hayden Sphere.
Entry into the Planetarium is by many avenues. One is the pair of
gates at the southeast corner of the Cube. If you remember the floor
plan of the old Museum-Planetarium, there were on the first floor two
gates in the northwest 'armpit' of the Museum. One led to a short
covered walkway into the old parking lot. This was the back entrance
of the Museum for those coming from 81st Street. The other was a
bronze double door that opened into the old Planetarium building. A
small ticket booth and turnstile was beyond these doors (as viewed
from the Museum side). This is how you got into the Planetarium from
inside the Museum.
The cutouts for these gates were enlarged to be entrances to the
first floor of the new Planetarium. They land you in the same
southeast corner of the Cube. The reason for keeping the gates as two
holes in the wall of the Museum is that the zone between them contains
structural columns.
There is an other and new pair of gates on the lower level,
directly under this pair, that leads directly onto the arena of the
Hall of the Universe. And an other new adit is by a short stair on the
east side of the Cube coming from the Hall of Planet Earth. An an
other on the 2nd floor by a gentle incline. This is how the Museum
communicates with the power-of-ten ramp. Other avenues of approach are
under construction in the southwest side of the Cube.
The new main entrance of the Planetarium where the old grilled
gates used to stand, is functionally the new north entrance to the
entire Museum. Once within the Planetarium you may roam freely thruout
the Museum. A new hall to the southwest corner of the Cube is under
construction for a summer 2000 opening. This doubles as a staging area
for school groups whose buses berth in the new parking garage and also
communicates with Columbus Avenue as a new western access into the
Museum.
The glass used for the interior barriers and doors seems to be of
the same ultraclear kind for the walls of the Cube. You can not see
the stuff! What may look like a thin guardrail on a balcony is
actually faced with panels made of this glass. You won't lose a child
by slipping under the rail. But I did see many people accidently
kicking the panels, for lack of evidence when they looked over the
railing.
I saw many people collide with the glass doors and barrier walls
for the same reason. At the main entrance fronting 81sst Street a
squad of greeters continuously warned of the glass and steered people
to the doors.
The perimeter of the floor, away from the Hayden Sphere, is laid
with a spiffy stone which some thought was artificially concocted for
the Planetarium. It's really a natural stone in common use for
corporate entrance halls and lobbies. It's black but you can see
several centimeters into it! Embedded in it are flecks of mica that
throw off rainbow colors when sunlight hits them! The effect is that
you're walking thru space all glittery with stars. I don't know the
name of this stone but I see it from time to time in other decorative
applications.
There is a totally queer feature not evident during the preview.
When you pay $9.50 (or $19 including the suggested Museum donation)
you expect to have your visit welcomed, no? Like, punch my ticket. Yet
on all the visits since opening day there was an astounding sloppiness
in handling the tickets. There is no true ticket gate!
The audience piles into the elevator lobby and ushers sort of gets
it queued up. The ushers are not terribly attentive to the tickets. I
saw routinely people with their tickets out ready for taking yet the
usher waves them by. These people are then perplexed to the max when
they realize, after getting to the forebay, that they still have their
ticket!
In Europe it's common to pay the admission and walk into a show
without actually having to present the ticket. In America it's
universal to have a gatekeeper who collects, punches, mutilates the
ticket as a sign of positive entry to the show.
What's more, when a ticket is collected by an usher, it's just
pocketed without inspecting it! Tickets are valid only for a
particular show. You may have found that a show you requested tickets
for is sold out, yes? Well, I can see how a nefarious soul may slip
into a show with an uncollected ticket from a previous show. Please be
fair. If you are let thru with ticket still in hand, please put it
away as a souvenir of your visit, OK?
Paralleling the fiasco with the tickets, is the one with the
cosmic passports. The passport is a postcard with a wiggle picture on
one side. It's supposed to let you travel anywhere in the universe,
once it's signed by the bearer. Yes, it's a fairground sort of
gimmick. After all, only the bearer of the passport is authorized to
have it in his possession, got that straight?
These are handed out by ushers as you board the elevators. With no
controlled ducting of the people flow, it's usual to miss out on the
passport and see the show without it. Near the end of the show a
comment is made that your passport is now valid but without it the
audience thinks this is a cute statement. Even if you do get a card,
the lighting in the forebay is too dim to see it and you'll stuff it
in your pocket to worry about on the way home.
Just about everyone is annoyed with the forebay of the Hayden
Sphere and the Big Bang theater. The forebay is the large darkened
arena into which the audience is packed before opening the door to the
Hayden Sphere. People from the elevators continuously are sent into
this room until the entire audience is accumulated. This can easily
take ten or more minutes!
The forebay gets crowded, noisy, stuffy. There are only a couple
seats for the tired or feeble folk. When I went during school group
visits, the place wa deafeningly loud.
There are several video screens hanging from the ceiling all
showing the same tape. You look at the nearest one. The presentation
is plain childish and has an overbearing voiceover. After a while most
everyone stops watching and gets to fidgetting. These screens could
far better show the exhibits in the Hall of the Universe so people
know what to look for and how to interpret them.
Preparation of the visitors to better appreciate the exhibits is
sorely needed. For instance, the timeline and power-of-ten ramps are
so poorly understood that they are treated as fancy exit ramps. People
commonly walk or skip down them without stopping to admire the caption
plaques. The video screens in the forebay could illustrate sample
plaques and tell how to read them.
Just before admitting the audience into the sky theater, a hurried
narration warns against eating, smoking, and other no-nos. After a
week or so, because of the very misleading advice on the website and
brochures of the Museum, this now warns against flash pictures.
There is no crowd control in this forebay. When the doors open,
everyone surges forward and groups break apart easily. There are only
a couple ushers in the dome as hundreds of people rush for seats.
Altho, I hope, only as many tickets are sold as seats for each show,
the residual empty seats are tough to find for the last people getting
into the dome. Yet, so far, on my visits the dome was apparently fully
packed and by show start I could see no empty seats left.
The skyshow performed without incident on each of my visits and no
one else reported any major glitches. However, there are two major
points to note. First is that after all the glorious uprising of the
Zeiss projector at the beginning of the presentation, the machine
actually only runs for the first couple minutes. It puts up the
initial sky with the stars and Milky Way. There after the show
continues from the periphery-mounted computer projectors.
This transfer of the performance takes place during the flyby of
the planets, which soar overhead in 3D full-motion animation. When the
stars are put back up, they are obviously fuzzy compared to the sky in
the opening scene of the show. These stars are now projected from the
peripheral machinery. Probably during the planet parade, while every
one is focused on the dome, the Zeiss machine retracts into its well.
When the audience exits, the machine is sound asleep under their feet.
The objects moving around on the dome are each accurately
portrayed according to the best available data. Each known star in the
Milky Way and each known galaxy in the universe is individually
addressed for its proper motion and position! Hence, the scenes are
not artist's concepts or stylized simulations.
A brief mention of the technical accuracy was added several weeks
after opening day, but the audience surely forgets it quickly. To it
the whole production may just as well be some animation concocted in a
studio with imagination.
All in all, the new Hayden Planetarium, given the immense number
of objects in its database, moves on the dome about 100 times more
points than all the other planetaria in the world combined!
The skyshow did cost a pretty penny to assemble. It took several
hours of CPU time at the supercomputing centers of University of
Illinois and University of California at San Diego to put this show
together! The actual price is not publicly stated, but computer
graphics experts who saw the skyshow guesstimate that it must have
cost about $4 million!
Even if it cost 'only' $1 million, that's quite an expensive
skyshow. For sure there will not be any frequent change of show during
the year. Two or three changes per year are the most to expect. More
over, this show is utterly unique to Hayden. No other Planetarium can
borrow or buy it for they have neither the equipment nor crew to play
it.
After the skyshow everyone is let out of the exit door with mass
chaos as groups try to reassemble. The area beyond the exit door is a
narrow walkway which leads to a single-lane escalator. Teachers and
tour guides yell out for their folk to gather around them as streams
of people crisscross. It takes an uncomfortably long time for the full
audience to clear out this area.
I have one grand correction, one which was not evident during my
visit during the preview period. The power-of-ten and timeline ramps
are accessible from the free-range zone of the Museum. They are not
restricted only to the paying audience of the skyshow.
When I and the three other AAAers exited the skyshow on February
15th we were herded directly onto the power-of-ten ramp. This, by the
way, is properly named Scales of the Universe. We didn't see any other
way to enter the ramp, likely from the prodding of the ushers.
The Scales of the Universe ramp springs from the 2nd floor of the
Museum and can be entered directly from that floor. Hence, once having
gotten into the Museum you can walk the ramp, to and thru the Big Bang
theater, and down the the Cosmic Pathway ramp.
You still have the diode at the Big Bang theater, you may only
enter at the one side and only exit at the other side. That is, you
may walk either way along the Scales of the Universe up to the Big
Bang theater, even backing up to the top and leaving the ramp. You can
walk either way along the Cosmic Pathway up to the Big Bang theater
and back to the 1st floor. But you can only procede from the former
thru the Big Bang theater to the latter.
What this means is tat the ENTIRE premises of the Planetarium is
open for you after admission into the Museum with the sole exception
of the skyshow itself. You may even, if you choose, see the skyshow,
leave for the rest of the Museum, and skip the ramps completely.
It also means that the ticket price of $9.50 for the skyshow does
not include inescapably the ramps and Big Bang theater. You're paying
for JUST that 20ish minute space tour under the dome. Is it worth it?
That's really an individual assessment.
This entree onto the power-of-ten ramp from the Museum floor
removes my concern for fire safety. People on this ramp may be led
back to to the top and to safety thru the Museum.
An other constant source of annoyance is that Big Bang theater. I
and other astronomers stopped watching it. I now just walk straight
thru, as the doors are opened. Most people seem to expect something
really special to happen and are let down when all they get is a trite
commentary and some flashing gyrating lights.
The lower level, one floor below the street, is the Hall of the
Universe and has most of the exhibits. If you stand back and study the
layout there is a flow of topics across the floor. Most people just
flit from one exhibit to an other with no particular sequence.
The exhibits are arranged to leave large open areas here and
there, specially under the Hayden Sphere. This allows for use of the
floor for gatherings, like private parties or receptions. There's
nothing wrong with getting extra use from the space when the
Planetarium would otherwise sit idle. In fact, if outside nonastronomy
groups can be attracted to the edifice and pay a suitable rental for
it, that's all to the better utilization and revenue for astronomy.
There are three types of exhibit. One is rows of man-high 'vending
machines'. These are cabinets faced with backlighted panels described
a this or that subject of astronomy. They are massed around the floor
in several arcs, concave to the viewer. The captions are short but
tightly worded. And large, contrasty, and legible. The illustrations
are housed in circular lunettes. Many of the cabinets had grills like
for speakers, but I never heard anything from them on my visits. I did
hear what seemed to be narration from elsewhere but when I tried to
track down the source, it was mute. Maybe I missed a pushbutton or
didn't wait long enough to let the tapes rewind?
An other type is a corral with some fancy theme within it. This
may be an animation, large picture, or an artifact. The coronal
artifact of the Planetarium is the big meteorite, Willamette, which,
on account of the present bruhaha about it, is sounded 'wih-LA-mett'.
And it's spelled with one 'i'; no, it's not Williamette like 'WIH-
lya-mett'.
In brief, the Grand Ronde Indian confederation from Oregon state
claims the meteorite is a tribal treasure and totem. It now has a
federal claim to make the Museum return it to Oregon! This flap erupts
every ten or do years when someone in Oregon reads a history book and
asks why the thing is in New York.
Without going into the whole rigamarole here -- hit on 'Willamette
meteorite' on the Web -- the mother is a unique specimen of meteorite.
In fact, by some weird celestial process it's a recrystallized steel
gemstone. Bring with you a nonmetallic rapper, like a hard plastic
coin or key case. Gently rap on the meteorite. Oh! What a gorgeous
sound!! Just make SURE to MEVER use anything that may scratch the
iron. Positively do not try this with the very coin or key itself.
In one of the photoessay sessions I explained that the Willamette
was placed on its stand before the Planetarium was roofed over and the
Hayden Sphere built above it. It's now well surrounded by structure,
making it impossible to remove without serious dismantling of the
Planetarium. There is no clear straight path from it to the street by
which perhaps a crawler or bridge crane could walk it out of the
Planetarium.
Yet there is precedent for such dismantling. When the Anighito
meteorite, the largest on Earth in captivity, was moved from the
Planetarium to the Hall of Meteorites in the Museum, a cutout was made
in the side of the old Planetarium. A three-meter square hole was
punched thru the brick and mortar wall facing the parking lot. The
iron, all of its 36 tons, was winched out on heavy wooden rollers and
eased onto a flatbed truck. The whole process took a week.
The third exhibit type for many minutes threw me. This is a
vertical tubular spar about two meters tall with an incised and
backlighted legend on it. There are lots of these all over the floor.
The first clue I sussed out was that these were all outside the shadow
of the Hayden Sphere, yet there was no actual 'thing' to look at near
them. They looked like those undecipherable information pillars in
shopping malls.
I happened to pass a couple of them with the open sky behind them,
Extending out from the top, the spars being tubular, was a thick wire
going straight up into the air. Following it upward, it ended in one
of the hanging models of a celestial body! The legend was the object's
name, like 'Venus' or 'spiral galaxy'.
One amusing incident happened to me. On the landing at the end of
the timeline ramp there is a large, about one meter diameter, globe
sitting on a low base. It sort of looked like the Moon with its relief
surface. As I moved in closer to study it an usher skipped over to me.
He was obviously proud to assist me. He caressed the top of the globe,
like a father would the head of his little boy, and gushed, 'This is
the Moon. OUR Moon!'. Yes, father. It in fact was a relief globe of
the Moon.
On ny evening visits the Planetarium has a jazz band playing away
in the Hall of the Universe. The music is nice and lively. It is,
however, terribly loud. It distracts you from examining the exhibits
in that hall.
I was at the Planetarium both by day and by evening. Amazingly,
there is very little direct sunlight onto the main floor. With this
period when the Sun is still south of the equator, this is not perhaps
a fair statement. I did trace out the Sun's path in the sky for summer
-- recalling that we got that legendary Stonehenge effect on Manhattan
-- it seems that the floor is pretty well shaded all year round. Hence
I thought there would be less interference from ambient illumination
than I experienced on the ramps.
Sorry, folks.
The good news first. In evening (I was not yet there in full
night) the place is wonderfully lighted. The illumination is thoroly
civilized and mature and in full partnership with the outside sky. You
really have to try hard to get an obnoxious light in your face.
Most of the captions and signs are plainly legible. There were an
annoying number made with lousy combos of ink and paper color. But
there were enough others of excellent legibility to cover for these.
The video screens were easy to see, even the littler ones. Lighting of
the floor, stairs, ramps, was even, with no confusing shadows or blind
spots.
The Hayden Sphere in evening from the bottom looks bluish-gray in
the stead of the Cherenkov blue seen from outside in the street. And
from the floor the mother really looks like it hovers, like some
spaceship fixing to land on you. The tripod of struts is there, of
course, painted a mild gray, similar to the tint of electric power
poles to blend them into the landscape. They fade away among the
exhibits, leaving the immense ball over your head.
In elevation, the Hayden Sphere nadir is about at the level of the
park outside, or about 3 meters below 81st Street. It's about four
meters above your head from the floor of the Hall of the Universe. The
hanging models of the celestial bodies are all outside the equator of
the ball so they are visible from the floor. They apparently have
separate spotlights to illuminate them. Yes, no George Awad work here;
the pieces are immature globes or crude shapes.
Now for the daytime, that's an other story. Despite the absence,
by the shade of the Museum and the Hayden Sphere, of direct sunlight,
the blue sky is incredibly brilliant. Maybe it's the super transparent
glass, still sparkling clean from newness, that admits such copious
light. In any case, just about every video screen is hopelessly washed
out and tough to read. Many of the exhibit panels are a strain to read
from the reflected skylight off of the shiny metal surfaces.
The sphere-in-a-cube is already a hotwire theme in architecture
and is fast becoming an icon of the City, like the crown of the Empire
State Building or the head of the Statue of Liberty. It is also
already a rallying symbol for the darksky movement.
For here is a huge structure, communicating directly thru the
glass walls with the heavens above, and as busy as the anchor store in
a suburban shopping mall. Yet it lives in complete harmony and
partnership with the stars! Preliminary tests from the adjacent patio,
not open yet, prove that there is sensibly no loss of stars. Not a
bulb is visible from outside the Planetarium and the totality of
reflected light from the Hall of the Universe is hooded by the Hayden
Sphere itself.
Construction is pretty much finished. Of the kinds of defect I
found in my February 15th visit only a few remained. Most of the
panels were aligned and tightened, most light leaks were sealed, most
missing parts were replaced. There were still odds and ends of untidy
work here and there. The one gross defect still outstanding is that
stair joining the first floor, near the timeline ramp exit, to the
lower level.
By the end of March of 2000 essentially all the construction
defects were cleared up. From then on, what defects I found seemed to
be from breakage or wear and tear.
There is one stair in particular that strikes me as still shaky.
Literally shaky. This joins the end of the timeline ramp to the lower
floor. From the timeline ramp you may turn into the Museum to visit
the Hall of Planet Earth or continue downstairs to the lower floor.
This stair is made of bolted sections in an open frame style. It is
clanky and rattly under the feet. The feeling makes you grip the
handrail. But this handrail is built in separated segments. As your
hand slides across the gap between segments it's inevitably snagged.
So that's what's with the new Hayden Planetarium. Do come and see
it. In spite of the glitches, it is a dropdead spectacular place, a
veritable temple of the heavens. While here, see the rest of the
Museum, too. Bring lots of film, tape, discs, chips for picture
taking. You may use flash anywhere EXCEPT within the dome. Remember
that. A wide angle lens is a real plus to take in the immensity of the
Hayden Sphere. The bookstore is well stocked with good astronomy
gumbo.
The cafe in the basement of the Museum and eateries around the
Museum campus are fairly priced. Central Park is just across the
street. The subway and bus stops are right there at the corner.
Still at sea about your upcoming visit? Do this. Email me and I
usually can arrange to show you around the place.