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Whenever there’s a spike in public interest in things astronomical, your local planetarium is likely the focus of attention. In many towns and cities that will certainly be the case during the 100 Hours weekend … and throughout 2009.
Here in Canada a consortium of major planetariums banded together to pool our production resources and grant-application power to create a nationally-funded show for IYA09. Thanks to federal government support we were able to produce Galileo Live!, a unique planetarium show about Galileo and his discoveries. I know of several planetarium shows about Galileo in circulation this year, notably Two Small Pieces of Glass (see http://www.400years.org/planetarium.php).
But for our show, we did not want a documentary about the history of the telescope.
We wanted to have Galileo, live on stage, telling us his story in person — after all, the year is a celebration of a person as much as a thing, the telescope. Galileo’s life makes for a fascinating and personal story that an audience can easily identify with.
So our show uses a live actor to portray our main character, supported by the recorded voice of his daughter, Virginia, better known to us now as Sister Maria Celeste, thanks to Dava Sobel’s superb book, Galileo’s Daughter.
Together, father and daughter tell the story of Galileo’s early years with the telescope, when he made all his remarkable discoveries, sights everyone can see today.
As seen here, we set him in various immersive scenes shot on location in Italy. This is the Medici Chapel.
The show was a co-production of the planetariums in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Montréal, with me writing the script and providing the production direction.
However, we each have hired our own local live theatre directors and actors to stage the show. The result is a unique blend of live theatre with projected multi-media images, and the panoramic scenes, like this one above shot in the garden of Galileo's house at Arcetri. Another "star" of the show is the authentic-looking working replicas of Galileo's early 20x telescope, masterfully built for us by Jim and Rhoda Morris of SciTech Antiques (http://www.scitechantiques.com/Galileo_telescope/). Audience members get to look through the replica to see what Galileo actually saw.
Below is a beautiful dome-filling antique illustration from the Cellarius Atlas of the heliocentric solar system.
At the bottom, Galileo performs an on-stage experiment and drops his weights from the top of the Tower of Pisa. See? Aristotle was wrong!
The show opened last weekend in Vancouver and opens this weekend here in Calgary. Winnipeg opens it later this spring while Montréal has it set for an October opening, in French and English versions. The program is one of our country’s major projects for IYA. For other images of our show as it appears here in Calgary, see our Calgary IYA Flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iyacalgary. And for information on what we're up to in Calgary, see our special IYA website at http://www.astronomycalgary.com. For the big picture of what we're doing across Canada visit http://www.astronomy2009.ca/
However, I suspect there is not a planetarium in the world that isn’t presenting something special about Galileo and the history of the telescope this year, and especially over the 100 Hours weekend. As they say, check “your local listings.” If you haven’t been to your planetarium since that class field trip in grade school — an all too common remark — shame on you! Check it out. Support your local emporium of the stars. You know Galileo would have done so.
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