Dylan Brogan
Planetarium director Geoff Holt shows off an extreme ultraviolet image of the sun before the “Romance Under the Stars” program.
It’s Valentine’s Day on a blue planet orbiting a yellow dwarf star at the center of a solar system in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Thirty couples are holding hands and gazing up at the star-covered dome at the planetarium in James Madison Memorial High School.
Geoff Holt, educator and director of the school district’s planetarium since 1994, is projecting the night’s sky as one would see it with nearly a full moon on the light-polluted streets of Madison. It’s a beautiful sight with hundreds of stars. But the audience audibly gasps when Holt displays what the sky would like on a moonless night away from the city lights.
“Now we can see up to 2,000 stars,” says Holt, who welcomes questions during the show. One man asks, “So why is the moon still up there?”
“This is the planetarium,” says Holt, dryly. “We can make magic happen.”
And the planetarium is full of magic.
The district hosts several “Romance Under the Stars” fundraising events around Feb. 14. The shows, which are geared for couples, always sell out. But the Valentine’s events aren’t much different from the dozens of public shows the planetarium holds each year or what thousands of school kids across Madison see during field trips. They don’t have to be. To ponder your existence within the vastness of the cosmos is enough to inspire awe and to grab on tight to someone special.
“Here is Polaris, the North Star,” says Holt as he points a laser at the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor. For hundreds of years, Polaris helped humans navigate the world without a compass or GPS.
Holt explains that the star is special because it always seems to be in the same place. “How can it be that there is a star that doesn’t seem to move even though we’re on a spinning planet?” he asks. “It’s because Polaris is almost directly above the Earth’s north pole, right on the axis on rotation. So it appears not to be moving at all.”
A little over a year ago, two digital projectors replaced the original arc light and slide projector system installed when the planetarium opened some 50 years ago. The new technology allows Holt to fly the audience to the moon, Saturn and beyond using stunning imagery provided by NASA and the European Space Agency. After a peek at the Apollo 15 landing site, Holt shows the ice particles in Saturn’s oblong rings shimmering like stained glass through church windows.
“Up until 2017, the Cassini spacecraft had been faithfully orbiting Saturn for something like 13 years. As it started running low on fuel, they had it doing daring things like diving in between the cloud tops and Saturn’s rings,” says Holt, crisscrossing around the sixth planet in our solar system as he controls the projector with a small remote. “That enabled scientists to weigh the rings, to find out the mass. That helped them figure out that the rings aren’t as old as Saturn itself. The rings are only 10 to 100 million years old. Saturn is more like 4 billion years old.”
Holt then takes the couples even farther out for a look at the spiral galaxy we call home.
“These are all the stars in our part of the Milky Way, the ones that make the constellation pictures. We are in one of the minor spiral arms, about half way from the center of the edge,” says Holt. “The center glows like that because it’s packed with stars. [When] we look at the galaxy from Earth, we are seeing its side. Which is why the Milky Way makes a stripe in our sky. We are looking along the plane of our galaxy from the inside.”
The picture illuminating the 30-foot dome washes over the enthralled spectators. To end the show, Holt takes the crowd even deeper into space to show all the galaxies discovered and mapped by humanity. It’s a dizzying swirl of color and orbs of light representing trillions of stars and nebulae.
The young woman sitting next to me sums it up with one word: “Wow.”
Upcoming public planetarium show
Exploring Mars: March 18-20
Tickets: $2.50 at madisonplanetarium.org
Planetarium facts
Visitors each year: 20,000
Built: 1966
Reclined seats installed in 2016: 67
Number of directors in the planetarium’s history: Two, Doug Holt and Geoff Holt (no relation)
Milky Way stats
Second largest galaxy in the Local Group which contains 54 galaxies
Shaped like a spiral disk (but it’s likely warped)
100-400 billion stars
40 billion Earth-like planets
1,000 light years thick
100,000 light years wide
13.5 billion years old
