After opening two and a half months ago, Ball State’s planetarium has broken its weekend attendance record.
The $5.2 million Charles W. Brown Planetarium opened last October, but began its public shows every weekend with a grand opening Nov. 8. Since then, the planetarium has had more than 5,000 weekend visitors, which breaks last year’s record of 4,000 weekend visitors for the entire year in the old planetarium.
This record-breaking attendance means every show has been filled, Ron Kaitchuck, director of the planetarium said.
“If you want to see a show you are probably going to have to show up 20 minutes before,” he said. “You can’t just show up five minutes before and expect to be let in.”
Many of the shows are directed toward family and kids.
Philip Repp, vice president of information technology and Jen Bott, associate provost for learning initiatives took their kids to a planetarium show Saturday. They brought their two sons, Aidan, 8, a student at Burris Laboratory School, and Owen, 5, a preschooler at Wee Wisdom.
“The power to make this kind of impact on small minds especially within our community and to be free is amazing,” Jen said. “[Aidan] even got his brother excited about coming here. It was all he talked about after he went here with his class.”
One of the two shows on Saturday revolved around the winter night sky, exploring the constellations of Gemini and Orion and general stars people see every night if they look up. It went so far as to go inside the nebulae – space clouds – that house the stars of Orion’s belt. And every show brings something different.
“This is like my eighth or ninth show and no show is the same,” Emily Keifer, a 5th grade teacher at Cowan elementary school, said. “I brought my class here and they loved it, they didn’t know the old one even existed.”
The show eventually showed night skies unseen by northern hemisphere. The dome’s projection transitioned to show stars such as Alpha Centauri and the Milky Way’s neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.
The vivid detail of the millions of stars on the dome wasn’t possible in the old planetarium. It could show about a thousand, Kaitchuck said.
“When I was a student at Ball State, I never went to the old planetarium,” Keifer said. “I went for the first time last year and I was blown away. Then they said they were breaking ground on a new one and to stay tuned... It shows an advancement at Ball State and a hint at what's to come."
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