Contact: Bob Adams
(425) 564-3081
badams@bcc.ctc.edu
See stars as they appeared to early humans?
View Orion from a new angle?
You can May 12 at BCC's digital planetarium
BELLEVUE, WASH. - Travel in time while you tour the stars at "The Ever-Changing Sky," a digital planetarium show being presented at 7 and 8 p.m. Saturday, May 12, in BCC's Willard Geer Planetarium.
The audience will fly through the Big Dipper to gain a new perspective on the stars and come face-to-face with the night-time sky as it was seen by early humans and as it will appear to our descendants 100 millennia in the future.
Tickets for the 40-minute presentations, at $2, will be sold only in advance and only in person at the BCC Bookstore on the college's main campus (3000 Landerholm Circle S.E., Bellevue, at the intersection of S.E. 28th St. and 148th Ave. S.E.).
"Over thousands of years the constellations will warp out of shape - changing so much that they will no longer be recognizable as we know them," said BCC Astronomy Instructor Art Goss, who created and narrates the show. "With our new digital planetarium projector we can actually see this happen - something that old-style projectors can't show."
Because the planetarium must be totally dark during the show, no one will be admitted once the presentation begins.
The show is not considered suitable for children ages six and below.
"As the finale we fly the audience through a wormhole in space," Goss said. "It's pretty intense."
Geer Planetarium was the first to be built in the Puget Sound region and, thanks to donors to the BCC Foundation, is now the only one in the state that uses an advanced, digital system to project images on the planetarium's domed ceiling.
The facility was the brainchild of Willard Geer, BCC's first physics instructor and one of the inventors of color television.
Today the 60-seat planetarium is almost constantly in use as a classroom for more than 1,400 BCC astronomy students and 1,600 elementary and middle school students each year.
A BCC campus map showing the location of the bookstore can be found online at http://bcc.collegestoreonline.com/.
For more information about Geer Planetarium or the May 12 shows, call the BCC Science Division at 425-564-2321.