|
May 16, 2007
Contact: Bob Adams
(425) 564-3081
badams@bcc.ctc.edu
BCC’s digital planetarium shows
to be repeated in June
BELLEVUE, WASH. – Bellevue Community College will offer two repeat showings of its highly popular digital planetarium presentation, “The Ever-Changing Sky,” at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 16, in the college’s Willard Geer Planetarium.
Tickets for the 40-minute presentation, at $2 each, will go on sale May 23 in the BCC Bookstore, located in the Student Services Building 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.).
Tickets will be sold only in advance and only in person at the bookstore. Tickets for the early May presentations of the show sold out quickly.
Because the planetarium must be totally dark during the show, no one can 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.”
The audience also 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 from now.
“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.”
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 and move 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.
For more information about Geer Planetarium or the June 16 shows, please call the BCC Science Division at 425-564-2321.
### |
