Spitz Blog

Just after midnight on January 1st, the New Horizons spacecraft will have its close encounter with the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, also known as (486958) 2014 MU69. Since New Horizons flew by Pluto in ...
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Tomorrow, Friday, will be the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 8, the first crewed space flight to orbit the Moon. You can simulate Apollo 8, and the other eight Apollo missions that went ...
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Nicolaus Copernicus’ (1473 – 1543) paradigm-changing work de Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) famously laid the groundwork for the overthrow of the geocentric universe that had held sway for millennia ...
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When we've been discussing applications of Starry Night in the dome, there was usually little need to worry about the human element, but with The Layered Earth (TLE) this is different. Most of the layers we use ...
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Earlier this month, another "multi-messenger" announcement was made of the discovery of a new astronomical outburst by different instruments that study different parts of the universe. The first major multi-messenger astronomy discovery was announced last ...
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I’m excited to announce that Volume 3 of the Spitz Fulldome Curriculum is being released to all SciDome users, and will of course be automatically incorporated into all future SciDome installations. We thought that this ...
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By now I hope you're heard about the interstellar interloper that's been passing through the inner solar system recently. This asteroid, which has been named 'Oumuamua, is the first-ever discovered object that has been observed ...
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On August 17th, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or "LIGO", detected gravity waves produced by the merger of two neutron stars. There are lots of good takes on this story, and it's important that we ...
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As the NFL season gets into gear (Go Bills!) it's time to mention football's deep connections with astronomy. The 1927 Broadway musical Good News, which gave us the popular song "The Moon Belongs To Everyone", ...
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For the last couple of days, there has been some news coverage of another small asteroid that's going to fly close to the Earth tonight. This happens fairly often, although it is a little unsettling ...
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Three long-awaited fulldome astrophysics apps created by Dr. David H. Bradstreet are now available for purchase and immediate download for installation on SciDome systems. Tides, Newton’s Mountain and Epicycles are selling for $200 individually or ...
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48 years ago last week Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. There is another anniversary last week that seems appropriate to mention at this point: On July 20th of 1925 the greatest scene in American ...
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With the Great American Eclipse of 2017 fast approaching, many planetariums are looking for content elements to use in local programming about eclipses. Rice University, supported by a grant from NASA’s Heliophysics Education Consortium, has ...
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One of the astronomical highlights of last week was the pictures returned by the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter when it zipped over the Great Red Spot at an extremely low altitude (8000 km.) Although the ...
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Volume 3 of the Fulldome Curriculum includes a lesson based on the Titius-Bode “Rule.” In this new teaching module we present the orbits predicted by the Titius-Bode relation in a historical timeline compared to the ...
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Novae and supernovae are among the most energetic phenomena encountered in the galaxy. Planetarium educators can simulate a number of historical nova and supernova events on SciDome using Starry Night Dome Version 7. The following ...
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Witnessing a total solar eclipse could change your life. Unpredicted eclipses have changed the progression of historical events. The unexpected environmental effects of a sudden darkness at midday can be very unsettling to people and ...
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The appearance of a total solar eclipse is so singular that it is impossible to appreciate it without having seen it for oneself. Unexpected eclipses have changes history in the past, although they can now ...
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The May issue of Sky and Telescope magazine has a timely item about "Napoleon's Comets". The most important of these was the Great Comet of 1811, which was the brightest comet with the longest duration ...
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Today is Benjamin Franklin's birthday under the calendar we use today, although he was born on the 6th of January of 1706. He was born before the Gregorian calendar reform was implemented in the English-speaking ...
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What's Up with the Pleiades Being M45? During a recent planetarium conference session, an interesting question came up about why the Pleiades is listed as M45 in Messier's catalog. Few people know the reason for ...
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Our ancestors were highly intelligent people who devised ingenious methods to model what they perceived to be reality in the skies. Unfortunately, they came at many of these observations with deep-rooted prejudices and a priori ...
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The pointer stars Merak and Dubhe point at Polaris and go once around per sidereal day, every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds.  By making a daily correction it is possible to estimate the ...
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In the 17th century the speed of light was unknown, and scientists questioned whether it had a finite value. Descartes argued that if the speed of light was finite, when we looked out into space ...
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In many of our astronomy classes, we discuss the importance of Galileo’s first telescopic observations in eventually overthrowing the Ptolemaic geocentric system. His first observations were relayed to the public in his short book Sidereus ...
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A historical lesson in Volume 2 of the Fulldome Curriculum is the astronomical aspect of the Boston Tea Party. As we learn, Colonists, furious at the tea tax, tossed chests of tea into Boston Harbor ...
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After years of development, Volume 2 of the Spitz Fulldome Curriculum has been released as a free supplement to all SciDome sites. The curriculum covers a wide gamut of subjects (see contents in sidebar) and gives ...
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Planetarium technology isn’t the only thing that’s changed from the last heyday of planetarium installations in the '60s and '70s. 21st century fundraising is also a new concern for today’s educational planetariums. Today, a planetarium ...
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Some of the richest resources of astronomical events and history are the articles of Dr. Donald W. Olson of Texas State University at San Marcos. He has written on an incredible number of topics, including ...
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We often hear about planetariums closing or cutting back due to lack of funding. The David M. Brown Planetarium in Arlington Virginia was one of them, until a group of local advocates got involved and ...
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Distance Spheres included in Starry Night allow “Cosmic Zoom” sequences in our domes. However, I also use them to show audiences scale sizes of stars, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, and the speed of ...
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