How Fruitful A School Visit Can Be To Planetarium

The trip to Planetarium was one of the most memorable trips of my life because this perhaps was the first trip of my life. I can still feel the excitement when we were taken to a trip in Planetarium by our school. It was not only full of enjoyment but we had even learnt many things. The moment it had been announced that we will be taken to Planetarium, the entire class started planning what we will do after going there. Nothing can be better than school days.

Now when I go to such places I hardly feel the similar pleasure. May be with the passage of time, many things have changed, including my state of mind. However I would say the best trip was the trip of which I'm mentioning about. I also had a very deep interest in astronomy. We were given a task of finding out information about Planetarium.What I got to know after my findings is a Planetarium is basically a theatre built for educating and entertaining the people with shows about night sky and astronomy.

One can see the whole solar system. These can be created by using a wide variety of technologies such as laser, fulldome projector and slide projector. These facilities can also be found in Science centers. But in most of the metro cities, these types of shows are exhibited in halls.Archimedes started the concept of planetarium which can show sun, moon and the other planets, though not the real one. The discovery of the Antikythera mechanism showed that such devices already were in existence during antiquity. In 1781, Eise Eisinga constructed the first planetarium in his living room in a Dutch town, Franeker. Oskarvon Miller worked with Franz Meyer, chief engineer at the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena for the ever constructed largest planetarium which is even able to display both heliocentric and geocentric motion.

Von Miller was also involved with the work of Zeiss factory with German astronomer Max Wolf at the same time as this was being built.After World War II, Germany was separated into two parts, East Germany and West Germany. In 1954, West German started making large planetariums and East German started making the small ones. The planetarium that projected the planet Uranus for the first time was Boston Museum of Science made by the Korkosz brothers. Uranus being at best marginally visible to the naked eyes is ignored by most of the Planetariums.In 1960s Japan also started manufacturing planetariums. Goto and Minolta profitably marketed numerous models. Goto got his achievement when the Japanese Ministry of Education brought in their smallest models, E-3 or E-5 in each of the elementary schools of the nation.

Former lecturer at New York City's Hayden Planetarium, Philip Stern made his Apollo model which was established in 1967 with film strip, a plastic programme board and recorded speeches and instructions. Subsequently, Stern turned out to be the head of Viewlex, the planetarium division which was a mid-size audio-visual firm situated on Long Island.Though we were taken to the Delhi Planetarium but the overview of the planetariums of the world made my concept more clearly about them. Thanks, to my teachers who provided we so many books on astronomy helped me to get an elaborate description about the origin of planetarium.