CSN Subject Matter, CSN Planetarium
Air date: Sunday, November 10


Meghin: Welcome to CSN Subject Matter, the College of Southern Nevada’s weekly radio program in conjunction with KNPR. I'm your host Meghin Delaney from CSN’s communications office. 


CSN is Nevada's largest and most diverse higher education institution, so naturally we've got plenty of great stories to share. You can learn more about CSN by visiting csn.edu, where we look forward to helping you succeed, Today I’ll talk with Dr. Andrew Kerr and Nick Juliano who run the Planetarium here at CSN, that's the only public planetarium in southern Nevada. During the week, the planetarium plays host to courses for CSN students and welcomes K12 kids for field trips. On weekends, student interns help facilitate seven shows for the public. We're going to talk more about that later.


First, I'd like to start by having you give our audience a brief introduction, a little bit of who you are and what you do for CSN,Andrew, can you go first?


Andrew: Of course, well I am the planetarium manager here at CSN. Basically what I get to do is I get to worry about everything from the day-to-day running of the Planetarium down to the pennies that we have to worry about for the shop and the show’s on the weekends, everything like that, but also just try to essentially do the best we can for making the planetarium a good place for folks to come and visit.


Meghin: And Nick, how about you?


Nick: My position is the planetarium program manager and I like to explain it as all of the fun stuff that comes with the planetarium, I'm basically I'm responsible for everything that the public sees so that includes the graphic design, our posters, we've got a little TV display right in front in our lobby area, that includes the merchandising for the gift shop and I also oversee our student interns as well, so basically if the public sees it, I've got some sort of hand in it.


Meghin: And I don’t think you said it there, but that means the programming, too right, like the shows that you watch?


Nick: Oh yeah, that’s the most important part. I also present most of the programming as well so that's kind of when you picture the stereotypical planetarium, the person in front pointing at the stars with a laser pointer, that's also part of the job as well.


Meghin: And since we’re an education institution I always like to ask folks on the show to share a bit of their education story and their path to CSN and what that looked like, Nick, can you go first?


Nick: I actually only have a bachelor’s right now most people in the planetarium field have at least a master's or so, but I knew from the get-go, from starting into going into my college career, that I wanted to be in the planetarium field and I wanted to find the quickest path to get there,  so in my undergrad I went to a school called SUNY Oneonta, I  kind of explain that as smack dab in the middle of New York state and it was a great program for astronomy but from day one I was looking at the planetarium ,working at the planetarium, all that kind of stuff. After I graduated I had an internship over in the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, I was working at the Dreyfuss planetarium there and then after that CSN shipped me over to Vegas and I've been working here ever since, it’s been a funtime.


Meghin: You said you knew from the get-go you wanted to work in a planetarium, where did that come from in your childhood, do you remember any kind of specific moment where you looked at the stars and said hey that, I want to do that?


Nick:  It was actually in a planetarium, it was a field trip, I don't remember what grade I was in, third fourth, fifth grade, somewhere around there, and it was a trip to Mystic, Connecticut, and there is a planetarium there and I actually remember seeing this program called seasonal stargazing and just learning about the different ways to find different objects in the sky, different stars using the different stars to point to different ones, finding constellations maybe even planets in the sky, and I'm going outside and experiencing daytime, I thought that was a pretty powerful thing and that kind of resonated with me and it wasn't until later that I connected the dots to make the constellation of where I wanted to be in a career. A little bit of irony is that that seasonal stargazing presentation is one that we present pretty regularly at the planetarium.


Meghin: It’s all come full circle. And Andrew, how did your educational journey bring you to CSN?


Andrew: Well mine is more roundabout. Nick has essentially started his career here at CSN. Mine was I actually finished up my graduate degree at the University of Missouri where I had taken over the observatory on the roof of the physics building and ran that for six years. Then I went to a small college in Ohio, the University of Findlay to teach, I was the only physics professor, the only astronomy professor and the planetarium that I inherited and got a chance to start working in. The planetarium rapidly became the best part of the day, it was the most fun, it was what I was supposed to be doing so I went from the University of Findlay to a museum in Texas to run the planetarium there and then from that museum in Texas I came up here on to CSN to run the planetarium here and it's been incredible, it's been so much fun, it's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing it in the planetarium field.


Meghin: Great, well I like that you have very different experiences in how you got here, I think that shows our students that no matter where they are now they can get to where they want to be regardless. To start, even though we've already started, I was hoping that one of you could give our audience who's maybe never been to the planetarium, maybe never been to any planetarium, just a very basic, what is a planetarium, what would you learn there, what does it look like, what do you do?


Andrew: Well a lot of people want the planetarium to open, they want the roof to open up, and that's not what we do at the planetarium. They kind of expect the planetarium to be an observatory, which is where the roof opens. We have a telescope and everything like that, but what a planetarium is instead is it's essentially a theater, where we project the sky or any sort of objects that we want to up on the dome in order to present a simulated sky to people. So our system does that, we've we put up the nighttime sky, but we also have the ability to show what are called full-dome videos and so that's that kind of the gist of our public shows on the weekends, it to give folks a chance to see a show, which can be about astronomy, although we also have shows about grizzly bears in Alaska, we have shows about all different things and so we we get that opportunity to show people a program that's designed to give them information about whatever it is, be it black holes, grizzly bears, anything like that. And then show them the sky with the seasonal stargazing like Nick had talked about earlier and then give them a chance to ask questions as well. So, essentially what we are is a theater, first and foremost ,and by being a theater it gives us a little bit of leeway, we don't have to worry about whether it's cloudy or not outside, granted being here in Las Vegas gives us 330 cloudless nights a year approximately, but guaranteed if there's an astronomical event that's one of the 30 cloudy night, but we don't have to worry about that. We are completely a digital planetarium, we can show whatever we want to show up on the Dome and give people a chance to see that, to think about it, and then to ask the questions that they want to ask afterwards.


Meghin: So you talked about the ability to have a wide range of programming so I wanted to ask you guys, how do you plan your programming, what do you think about when you're choosing what you're showing in this theater?


Nick: That kind of falls into my job and I wish I had some kind of step-by-step guide in order for the program's going to come to fruition, but there isn't one. There's no order to how we do it, however, we do take certain things into consideration, for example, we do often times popular astronomical topics of the time if it's like a hot topic like a super moon or like the solar eclipse that happened in 2017, certain things like that. Our programming comes down to the content that we have readily available, the CSN planetarium is actually one of the only planetariums I've been to that has a catalog of full-dome shows, which are movies that are projected in a hemisphere format, we have such an extensive catalog of them. I've never seen one this large. we have roughly 40 shows. huge amounts and so I basically have a lot to choose from in that regard, so we try to make certain themes, go off of those themes, have at least one show dedicated to the little kiddos and then a couple other shows that are a bit more engaging for older audiences, as well, but we make sure that it aligns with all of that, like I said the popular topics as well, but also topics that are taught in our astronomy classes here on campus, so that way whenCSN students come along they're getting something that is supplementary to their education as well.


Meghin: I know that you guys aren’t the only leading the astronomy classes, but the planetarium is used by students who are studying astronomy, so can you talk a little bit about what that is and why someone would want to study that?


Andrew: Actually, we have one of our professors,one of our astronomy professors, Dr. Goldwater, he prefers to teach in the planetarium, he wants to be in there, and so if you see a class on the North Las Vegas campus stop by Dr. Goldwater for astronomy, you know you're probably going to be in the planetarium for that class. Astronomy is one of those things that has captivated people from the very beginning, when you look at the first bits of writing developed over time, you look at the first things that survived as far as history is concerned most of them have to do with events that were happening in the sky, and so we have always been, we've always been folks who look up, that's the thing and we've looked up for thousands of years and wondered about things and so astronomy is that very basic yearning to understand what's going on in the world around us but outside of what's available to us, and so for thousands of years people have looked up to try to figure things out, we know a lot more than we did several thousand years ago and and that's what the astronomy classes are really about, is to give people that basic scientific knowledge of outside of the Earth's atmosphere so that when you look up you don't have to be bound by the superstitions and mythologies of the past, but instead you can understand at least to an extent what's going on out there. It's truly a remarkable thing and it plays to human curiosity at its most basic level. The nighttime was scary way back when, before we had lights, everything like that and knowing a little something about what's out there makes it just a little bit easier for folks to say to comprehend but also to deal with the human condition in a way.


Nick: Yes I think the piggyback off of that, the planetarium does come directly into play in pretty much everything that Andrew said, in that the planetarium is a way for us to take astronomy and take these concepts that are being discussed in classrooms and manipulate them in such a way that makes things more understandable for the students in a way that a flat projection of any sort wouldn't be able to. So for example if we're trying to explain to students how constellations don't look the way they look if you're at another star, solely because of the distances in positions of all of these stars together, we can take that kind of a concept we can go from Earth, point out of constellation and then fly away from Earth, simulate a flight that goes to another point not in our galaxy, that can highlight how all of these stars don't line up the same way in each different location. That’s something that explaining it, it's a little bit more difficult to do without the visual aid of something like a planetarium. They do describe planetariums nowadays as a collective virtual reality, so where in virtual reality you can learn things in a way that kind of gives it a more tangible, three-dimensional aspect, planetariums provide that in a collective setting.


Meghin: And planetariums have been doing that for way longer than we’ve had a lot of this virtual reality technology too. Clearly I think if a student is studying astronomy, you two are examples of what a career field might look like, you could go work at a planetarium, what are some other careers or jobs astronomy can lead students to?


Nick: Well Dr. Kerr actually has experience in a lot of different ways in a lot of different capacities of astronomy, so I'm going to let him handle that one.


Andrew: Well originally I kind of got led into astronomy to a certain extent, but when you actually out there and you look at what astronomy can do for you, as far as a career field, there are research astronomers, people who go out use the telescope time and then try to understand even more and in depth about the things that are going on. There are as far as that goes, there are also people who can work in the observatory, everything like that and working with the general public to provide that knowledge. Astronomy is a little more limited as far as a profession is concerned, although usually with the math and science skills that you bring to the table that opens up so many different avenues. As a matter of fact, I've known a lot of folks when they would get like their bachelor's degree in astronomy they can go on and go to grad school and do any number of different things, I've known people who have gone on to become doctors and lawyers and patent attorney and I knoe folks you just go out there teach physics at high schools, they teach astronomy, at college levels, there are quite a few different avenues that can be taken with astronomy, but then when you compare that to some of the other fields that people might study, it seems a bit narrower looking at it from a let like a thousand foot view but the reality is that most people who are interested in astronomy can end up going on and doing just about anything they want to, the knowledge, skills, actually translate into other as well.


Nick: It actually one of those few fields where there are employment opportunities on every single continent. There was a position posted a few years ago as the telescope operator, telescope coordinator in the South Pole Observatory, which is literally on the South Pole in Antarctica.


Andrew: And didn't you apply for that one? 


Nick: I did and that didn't happen.


Andrew: We're branching into making our own programming for the dome as well, he kind of wanted to take the cameras that we have and go down to Antarctica and do an Antarctic show that we could then put up on the dome, which I still think would be fantastic, but we'll get a few under our belt before we try and get all the permits necessary for going down to Antarctica.


Nick: It’ll take a bit of time. 


Meghin: I sort of wanted to move into talking to how the planetarium works with the community here, obviously a CSN, we’re a community college serving our community is a big part of our mission, our purpose here on and we are the only public planetarium in Southern Nevada, so I know that there are shows on weekends, you bring in K-12 kids, all that kind of good stuff, but I know that you can explain that good stuff better than I can explain that good stuff, so maybe Nick, can you talk us through how the planetarium works with the community?


Nick: Great well when I first got here and when we kind of both first inherited the planetarium from our predecessors, it was mostly a forward-facing institution and it still is as well, but we operate in a few different aspects to that. The Planetarium actually does lend itself to the community in a number of different ways. Firstly, we are a forward facing establishment within the college in that we interact with the public on a regular basis, so like you said we do have the K-12 groups we have at most 10 field trips per week and we do pretty regularly fill up all of those slots, so we are one of the first times that K-12 students experience CSN. In addition to that, we also do host our weekend shows, so we’ve got shows on at 6, 7 and 8 on Friday nights and then 3:30, 6, 7 and 8 on Saturdays, so we have seven different kinds of time slots for the public to come into the CSN campus, to experience a planetarium show. This is the only place in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada as a whole where they can actually experience something of this, so in that way we are a forward-facing facility within CSN, in that we are the time that people who wouldn't otherwise understand what CSN provides visit the campus, see different things that the campus offers. and experience the planetarium show that they can’t experience elsewhere. 


But we do also have a very inward facing, students first type mission as well, in that we partner with different disciplines, faculty of different disciplines to provide a unique educational experience that they wouldn't be able to have elsewhere. For example we do partner with Dr. Bogue a psychology doctorate, we partner with her for a kind of supplementary experience for her sensory perception class. So we have a show that kind of overloads their brain and as a result they have some sort of assignment that stems off of that, I think Andrew you can talk a little bit.


Andrew:  I purposely try to pick the most interesting shows that we have. Some of our shows are a little out there at times, that's kind of what happens when when you people doing things like that, and so yeah we can we can provide a little bit of an altered perception, if you will, and so if there's enough of a call for it will, we’ll be glad to bring it back. 


As far as the community goes as well though we try to do things to appeal to the community as a whole. The community in some ways is kind of starved for science, we're an entertainment town that's what Las Vegas is, but for the folks who live here, the entertainment is 24/7 and starts to wear a little thin at times. So places like CSN, places like the planetarium, we provide a good way for the community as a whole to come in and not necessarily forget about the entertainment aspect of everything, but to get that science aspect that people crave and the kids especially, they come in, they ask the best questions.


Meghin: And I’m sure that those kids to some extent don’t even realize it’s science, to them, this is entertainment. 


Andrew: This is entertainment, but they do understand it's science as well. The kids ask the questions, are a lot of times want to go deeper than what the show actually gives to them or they what we can do what we tried to give in the sanitized, OK this is the second grade version of this information, and the second graders sometimes want to know, well I would much rather know what the fifth grade information would be like, or I want to know what the high school information, or in some cases there are some second graders we've had come through the planetarium who have been I want to know what the college of this is.


Nick: I think you've actually phrase that what we do as edutainment.


Andrew: We've talked about that a little bit but then also when it comes to the public as a whole, we worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the  Las Vegas Astronomical Society as well, they are a fantastic group. We have a Mercury transit coming up on Veterans Day that Monday and so at the very least we're going to be out.


Meghin: What is a Mercury transit?


Andrew: Okay I'm sorry.


Meghin: You went too deep there, you’ve got to give me the second grade version.


Andrew: Because Mercury and Venus are between the Earth and the Sun they can pass in front of the disk of the sun from our point of view occasionally. Mercury it happens more regularly, Venus, you get two every hundred and twenty-five years or so separated by eight years between them, we just had our two Venus transits,the second one was a few years ago, and so so we won't have a Venus one now for another 125 years or so, but the Mercury ones happen  on a regular basis. So as of dawn on November 11, Mercury will already be crossing the face of the Sun and so with our telescopes, we have special solar filters, we have solar glasses that people can actually use, you can look directly at the sun without hurting your eyes. Don't do it any other way. We have special equipment, please come out and see. LVAS may be at the Veterans Day Parade for that one as well, providing an opportunity for folks there to be able to see it because it's going to already be within the disk of the Sun at dawn, and it'll end by 10 a.m., but if you want to come out and see Mercury cross the face of the sun, stop by the planetarium we’ll have it out in the parking lot or I think you can go to the Veterans Day Parade for LVAS. We try and do things to get out into the community to show off the special events as well. I was here for the solar eclipse, Nick gets to be at the next one, he chased totality, he was off looking at a total eclipse, I was looking at the partial.


Meghin: Which was a cloudy day here in Las Vegas, I remember.


Andrew: I was practically in tears, OK. I spent a month leading up to that quelling riots in the lobby because the solar glasses were out throughout the country, I had people calling me from Salt Lake City, schools calling me asking if I had solar glasses, and I did but we had them for our event and so I wasn't able to do that much for everybody. But we try to do things for the community as well, we try and get that science knowledge out there so that folks get that chance to see these events that are happening.


Eclipses as long as it's done before midnight will be out there, 4 a.m. I don't really want to be out in the parking lot but when we finish by midnight we will be out there. 


Meghin:I also wanted to ask me to do those big events and I know on the weekend shows you guys getting help from high school and college students who intern with you, so they're getting their hands on experience there, helping run that so can you talk a little bit about that program and the kind of students who might be interested in that?


Nick: So when I was an undergrad there were a lot of mentors who gave me the opportunity to help me get to where I am today and this internship program, the CSN ambassadors of astronomy, is just kind of my way of paying that forward and delivering those kinds of resources to students who are interested in the field, but don't necessarily have the hands-on experience or don't have anywhere else to get the hands-on experience. So what the ambassadors of astronomy, there are high school seniors or college students, I'd say about 95% of our ambassadors, our interns our CSN students, what they do is host our weekend shows and that's a pretty involved process. It's not a matter of just clicking play on a button and watch a movie, ot involves a lot of public speaking skills, a lot of event planning, event coordinating, telescope operation, because I also utilize our observatory to introduce the public to the night sky through our telescopes, and they also do develop their own planetarium show as well. So the second half of our 7 p.m. show is reserved for that purpose, so they use computer programming skills, computer scripting skills, to generate these shows, these unique shows, that they come up with, they do everything for and then eventually they present. It’s  a lot of different experiences rolled into one and if it's always an interesting explanation because I deliver it differently every time, but the students that come out of this program come out very competent, regardless however they came in, they come out as competent contributing members of the astronomy, science, informal education, even formal education field. There's just so many different things that they are introduced to.


Meghin: Thank you Nick and Andrew for joining me in the studio. You’ve been listening to CSN subject matter of the College of Southern Nevada’s weekly radio program in conjunction with KNPR. I want to thank dr. Andrew Karen Nick Juliano from the CSN planetarium for taking the time to come talk to me today. Thanks to KNPR for helping produce this show I wouldn't be able to do it without them. I’m Meghin Delaney, from CSN Communications office, you can learn more about CSN by visiting csn.edu or searching for us on any of your preferred social media sites, we look forward to helping you succeed and I'll see you next time.