At the University of Wyoming Harry C. Vaughan Planetarium movies and shows concerning the cosmos and its mysteries are offered to UW students and the general public of Laramie.
As said in the opening sequence of Star Trek the Original Series, space is the final frontier, a border between us and the great unknown.
The unknown, however, is steadily becoming less so with new discoveries being made and new hypotheses being pondered.
Tonight’s showing of “Distant Worlds” revolves around the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in the solar system and outside of it, and what it takes for life to develop.
The planetarium boasts a dome that is perfect for fulldome movies. Fulldome movies of the space variety are perfect because the movies are meant to be viewed in a 360-degree, immersive manner.
The seats in the auditorium are tilted back so that the viewer is looking up at the experience above them in a way that emulates what it is like looking up into the fathomless blanket of constellations and planets.
“The full dome is projected with two projectors, each projecting on one half of the dome, and then the image is stitched together in the middle,” Samantha Ogden, planetarium worker and project coordinator of the Space Grant Consortium, said.
The premise of “Distant Worlds” is the exploration of different planets and environments and hypothesizing about the different forms of life that may be in those environments. Some of the environments mentioned in the program are in our solar system, around the moons that are near the gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and it even mentions the possibilities of life near two distant stars.
It is the job of the planetarium to seek out movies such as “Distant Worlds,” as to continue to intrigue people with facts and hypotheses about space.
“You don’t have to be an astronomy major to look up at the night sky and question what everything is, and what is out there,” Ogden said.
By doing this, the program connects mankind’s own knowledge of what is required to maintain life with realistic conjecture about the environment needed to sustain alien lifeforms.
Nicholas Trimble, an astronomy and physics student at UW, assists at the planetarium and is familiar with the programs that the planetarium has to offer.
“The coolest part, the most fascinating part of ‘Distant Worlds’ is how, without spoiling anything, it reveals the likelihood, the probability, of life existing beyond Earth, as well how hard it is for us to imagine what this life would really be like, because all we’re used to is what we’ve lived with on Earth,” Trimble said. “It’s like trying to imagine a new color.”
The Tuesday night full-dome movies are a weekly occurrence while events happening at the planetarium on Friday are live presentations.
Tickets for fulldome movie showings and Friday’s live presentations generally are $3 for students from elementary school to college, $4 for non-student adults, and children five years old and younger get in for free. Tickets for events can be bought online, in room 204 of the Physical Science Building or if there are tickets left, they can be bought at the door of the planetarium 20 minutes before the show starts.
