By Josh Hughes
Ever wondered what on earth lies behind the mysterious locked door on the third floor, southwest side of Haggard Hall? If you have, you might want to directing your attention just left of the door, where there is a sign that reads “Spanel Planetarium.” All the same, it does have an air of mystique to it, and it’s easy to miss if you don’t frequent that specific area of the library. So, joking aside, what really happens inside the “Spanel Planetarium” and how can students get involved with what occurs behind its foreboding, locked door?
To get to the entire bottom of that, we can start at 1959, when construction on the facility started after Dr. Willard Brown donated a Spitz Model A-2 pinhole star projector to Western. The model could project over a thousand naked-eye stars, the sun and different phases of the moon, as well as both northern and southern skies. While plenty of small changes occurred over the next decades, nothing vital happened to the planetarium until 2004 when the facility got a major upgrade which included a new projector and plenty of nitpicky technological advances. Finally, in 2014, the school installed a Digistar 5 projection system, the “world’s best selling and most advanced fulldome digital theater system,” taking us to where we are now.
Renamed in 2013 after Dr. Leslie E. Spanel, a beloved professor of physics at Western who passed away in 2002, the planetarium now hosts weekly public shows from its remote corner in Haggard Hall. Each quarter the presentations change, usually featuring two major shows that play either on Thursday or Saturday. This quarter, the two films playing are “The Secret Lives of Stars” and “Dynamic Earth,” both of which will play until the very end of winter quarter on March 16.
“The Secret Life of Stars,” narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “X-Men” fame, will be playing only one last time this quarter, on Thursday, March 16 at 7 p.m. The film, clocking in at only 30 minutes, focuses on the vast assortment of stars in the universe, and in the planetarium it will take viewers through a dazzling journey of an infinitesimally small portion of some of the varying types of stars. After the show, there will be an additional live astronomer talk with time allotted for a Q&A session.
“Dynamic Earth,” the other film featured this quarter, is narrated by Liam Neeson of the “Taken” franchise, and will be playing on Thursday, March 2 at 3 p.m., and Saturday, March 11 at 7 p.m. Another (somewhat) self-explanatory film, the show covers some of the peculiar ways that our climate on earth is formed and altered. The film’s website itself reads: “Audiences will ride along on swirling ocean and wind currents, dive into the heart of a monster hurricane, come face-to-face with sharks and gigantic whales, and fly into roiling volcanoes.”
What more could you possibly ask for? Who ever knew such wildly adrenaline-rushing, Academy-Award Nominee narrated films were shown just feet above the Student Technology Center? “Dynamic Earth” also includes an astronomer talk at the end, and both shows should last about an hour in total.
All performances cost $10, and tickets can be bought at the WWU Box Office (tickets are not sold at the door). In addition to the public shows at the Spanel Planetarium, the venue hosts private shows for any sort of group for a fee. While there are only three remaining shows this quarter, be sure to be on the lookout for the spring quarter schedule, which should be getting released to the public in the next few weeks. Check out their website at http://www.wwu.edu/planetarium/, and finally find an excuse to see what’s on the other side of that intimidating, mysterious door.
ABOVE: Artist rendering of ultra-cool dwarf star Trappist-1 (far left) and its seven planets. Image from JPL-Caltech // NASA