Projections look bright for Juneau’s planetarium.<\/p>\n
The Marie Drake Planetarium hosted educators from the Museum of Flight in Seattle this week, and they came equipped with a digital system similar to the one Friends for the Marie Drake Planetarium are working to buy<\/a>.<\/p>\n A digital system would be a massive upgrade over the 1967 Spitz projector the planetarium currently uses, said volunteer Rosemary Walling, who is also a board member for FOMDP.<\/p>\n “It’s so different,” Walling said. “It’s like going to a computer from a slide rule.”<\/p>\n [They’ve played with Ozzy and Slash, now they’re playing in Juneau<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n Educators for the Museum of Flight<\/a> Paul Martinez and Mandy Walker-LaFollette showed the digital system’s capabilities to the Empire. Their fellow educator Natalie Copeland has also been demonstrating the projector at Juneau schools and the planetarium but was not present.<\/p>\n The Museum of Flight educators said they’re used to seeing their portable digital projector work in the confines of a traveling, inflatable dome and were impressed by what it looked like in the planetarium.<\/p>\n “Having a fixed dome here is amazing,” Walker-LaFollette said.<\/p>\n Using the projector, educators could fly to distant planets, travel along the surface of Mars and show overlays of how constellations as interpreted by different cultures.<\/p>\n “Ours is going to be bigger and better,” Walling said.<\/p>\n Currently, the planetarium makes use of its original 1967 projector and system, which has lost its abilities to depict much more than the night’s sky over the years.<\/p>\n “Over time, things stopped working,” Walling said.<\/p>\n First, the planetarium friends need to raise some money, and Walling said progress is being made.<\/p>\n Phase 1 of the project, purchasing a projector, is already complete. Walling said a projector that would normally cost about $32,000 was purchased for $16,500.<\/p>\n