A Brief History of the First Planetarium | Hacker News Reader

A Brief History of the First Planetarium

spectrum.ieee.org

40 pointsBrajeshwar12 comments

The last time that I went to a planetarium it was far too digital. As a child I would love going to the planetarium that was part of a university and it inspired my interest in astronomy at a (too) early age. Those original analogue projectors with all the movements and lenses of various sizes were amazing! Maybe we have it too easy with imax projections and lost something along the way that made a planetarium experience so believable and magical.

A little related, but I recently used a friends digital telescope (you look into an eyepiece, but you're looking at an LED screen of the captured image, not light directly from the lenses). And, for whatever reason, it felt far less magical than actually letting the photons from Jupiter hit my eye(yes, I know they are absorbed and retransmitted at various points, but you know what I mean).

This is pretty much how I feel about electronic view finders on modern digital cameras. I love my xSLR type cameras where I'm seeing the photons directly from the lens and not some digital version of them. I was not even aware of the telescope system that you mentioned actually being a thing, and I'm holding back my involuntarily gag reflex that kicked in just from the description.

I'm pretty sure that the mechanical planetarium of Eize Eizinga from 1781 predates this "World's First". Maybe because it is projected?

It's worth your visit btw.

https://www.eisinga-planetarium.nl/en/history/

One reproduces the sky as seen from Earth (planets, stars, galaxies, etc), while the other is a model of the solar system. The Zeiss device will let you see the sky as it is at different dates, from different places on Earth, will let you see the sky as if the Sun was not shining during daytime (so you can see the other objects). It is unfair to discount it as just a new way of presenting what that other machine was showing. They are in fact very different in what they can do.

First thing I thought too! But I guess it's a different definition of planetarium.

Wikipedia has even older mentions of planetarium, but does cite the one in Franeker as the oldest still working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarium

This seems to be a model of the solar system which is more commonly known as „orrery“.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrery

I nearly took a job at the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, they actually have a dedicated computer graphics team there which seemed like a nice friendly little shop. Really great they've kept it running this long, respect!

I loved planetariums as a kid but I wonder now if they still have much of a point with space simulators on computers and especially with VR space simulators.

I'm far more WOW!ed with a good VR sim. In fact just hovering over the earth at the start of Google Earth VR is way more impressive than the many times I've been to a planetarium and I've been many times over many decades and many continents. And, it will only get better as the resolution and fov continue to improve

The last time I went to one was in fact in Jena and it was a modern Zeiss projector. It was an awesome experience for a Brazilian who always used Zeiss stuff in photography, on top of being in Jena and seeing the Optical Museum and the Schott Glass Museum.

Moon landing conspiracy theorists will tell you it was too hard to paint a realistic sky on a sound stage in 1969 so all the moon landing footage has a black sky instead. Bogus. Thanks to this article we know we had planetariums as early as 1925. The moon landing is real

NASA knew that people new that planetariums existed, so they didn't paint a realistic sky because people would think they used a planetarium. Game theory!

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