UAA Planetarium: To 10 years, and beyond
by joey |
Thousands of students. Hundreds of screenings. Ten years on campus, and one film festival submission. Happy birthday, UAA Planetarium and Visualization Theater!
On Saturday, Jan. 19, from 2-8 p.m., the Anchorage community is invited to a free celebration of the campus planetarium, which opened in 2009 in the ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building (CPISB).
UAA's theater blends education with entertainment in consistently innovative ways - faculty Q&As, university science classes, medical simulations, even testing trial-and-error impacts on a virtual watershed.
"The philosophy of our shows is we want people to come to campus to learn," said Travis Rector, UAA professor of physics and astronomy, who has produced several shows for the theater.
And that's what guests can expect on Saturday. In addition to free films, the anniversary event will also include rocket-building and other hands-on activities in the CPISB atrium. The event will end with a live show hosted by Andy Puckett, the first director of UAA's planetarium.
The UAA Planetarium & Visualization Theater celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2019 (Photo by James Evans / University of Alaska Anchorage).
The list of shows for the 10th anniversary highlights the range of the planetarium's capabilities.
"If we ran all of our shows back-to-back we could actually be going an entire day. So we've selected our shows for this event that really highlight the breadth of subjects that our shows now cover," said Erin Hicks, planetarium director and professor of astronomy and physics.
That means guests can expect a lot more than a simple screening - picture salmon swimming on the ceiling and interplanetary jaunts to distant icy moons.
There will also be a few Alaska epics produced by Travis Rector, including an exclusive tour of McNeil River Game Sanctuary (from the 2013 UAA film River of Bears, the first live-action wildlife movie for planetariums, produced right here at UAA).
"What I really like to emphasize is we're telling the story of Alaska," Rector said of the planetarium. As producer on shows covering bears, northern lights and now an upcoming project on walrus haulouts at Round Island, he's brought cameras to corners of the state otherwise inaccessible.
The theater screens two shows on the northern lights, including one produced by UAA professor Travis Rector (Photo by James Evans / University of Alaska Anchorage).
That's part of the mission of the space. "When this building was designed, the idea of the public square - which is still an important part of UAA - was firmly in focus in our minds," Rector explained, meaning the theater was never intended only for students. In 2018 alone, roughly 4,000 people came to public shows and events at the theater, as well as an additional 3,500 students and youth groups for private shows.
And those visits aren't simply screenings. Every Friday night, professors host a double feature on campus, answering questions from the audience afterward on topics as diverse as philosophy, biology and math. Shows frequently sell out the 60-seat theater, which is second only to athletics in the number of people it brings to campus.
"It's a really powerful education tool to get a student in a seat and then place into a complex system," Hicks said of the theater. Whether they're middle schoolers on a field trip, college students in astronomy class, or lifelong learners on a Friday night, "they are very immersed in that environment and can see for themselves how different components of a system interact, which can be very difficult to visualize and understand when limited to pictures on a flat page of a book."
Hicks has been director since 2013, and has seen the planetarium's list of guest speakers continue to grow. "It's great to see how many UAA faculty are enthusiastic to share their work with the public, and to see how enthusiastic the public is to hear from them," she said.
The theater's uses have also expanded. WWAMI - Alaska's medical school - brings its new cohort to the theater each year to take a tour of the human brain. EPSCoR - the federally funded research program - recently wrapped a five-year $20 million study with a visualization project for the theater.
"It provides an opportunity for us to invite the community onto campus and to share the research and creative activities that are happening at UAA" Hicks said of the theater.
"Ten years on, we still frequently hear people say 'Wow, I had no idea this was here.' We're still reaching new people who are enjoying this great community resource."
The UAA Planetarium & Visualization Theater 10th Anniversary Event is Saturday, Jan. 19 from 2-8 p.m. Click here for the schedule of shows.
Can't make the event? Catch a regular Friday night show instead.
"UAA Planetarium: To 10 years, and beyond" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
