Introduction to the Solar System

There are a lot of wonderful and interesting things we can learn about the planets, what they are made of and how they got there, what they look like, and what it might be like to walk on their surfaces. Our robotic spacecraft have brought back tens of thousands of CD's worth of data and images of our sister planets, those worlds that we share a small neighborhood with in this vast universe. Scientists have pored over these data and images, prodded their theories with truth, and often constructed whole new paradigms for the processes that happen on the planets, and how the planets themselves came to be.

We now have a treasure of strikingly beautiful images of virtually all the corners of our solar system. To me, they shimmer with the grandeur of reality and the marvel that our species is so capable, heart and soul, of exploration. But what we have, of course, are facsimiles, images. Images have become the dominant medium of information today. Science fiction TV and movies today are capable, through immense technological prowess, of depicting alien worlds with the same exquisite detail that our spacecraft can, of the real planets. Because we are so adept at manipulating and being entertained by the medium of images, we must remember that they are only images, and that we are awash in the them.

For the planets to have a real meaning for us, we must use a different medium. That medium should be experience. Our sky is a vast, complex natural machine, driven by the rotation of the Earth, the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, and the motion of our neighbor worlds. How do we experience the planets? Just as all humans did, for hundreds of thousands of years -- by being out in the night sky, and watching them, day after day, generation after generation. So that's why we are here today, in the Planetarium. We're in a simulator, where we can ride to the night sky as seen by the ancients, and experience the sky as we travel in time and space. It may not be the real thing, but because we have this power, and our imaginations, we can try to recover a little of the magic of understanding and relating to the night sky.

Planetarium: