DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — If you inflate it, they will come. That’s what New York City College of Technology (City Tech) Physics Professor Gregory Matloff thought when he set up a portable planetarium in the student cafeteria last week.
The purpose was to drum up student interest in the college’s astronomy program. And that it did. On the two days the Starlab planetarium was in the cafeteria, around 150 people visited it and more than 120 students expressed interest in taking City Tech’s astronomy courses.
Funded by a Perkins grant, the planetarium is 18 feet in diameter and 10.5 feet in height. It can project all naked-eye stars visible from with latitudes between the Equator and North Pole. Another cylinder for the projector displays details of our galaxy and solar system.
The planetarium will see the light of day and dark of night again on the City Tech campus. A classroom is being modified to accommodate it and the device can also be partially inflated in another classroom.
“It’s very hard in the middle of a concentrated urban area like New York City to see the stars and constellations,” explains Matloff, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “While we do go on field trips to the Hayden Planetarium, our portable unit gives us a valuable teaching tool.
“It’s a nice addition to the telescope, sunspotter and skyspotter the physics department uses for sky viewing,” he adds. “Students in our current astronomy sections are being encouraged to help develop lab exercises for use with the planetarium.”
Possible labs using the portable planetarium include counting sunspots to determine solar activity, measuring the typical size of a sunspot group, comparing planet sizes and identifying constellations.
Currently, City Tech’s astronomy program consists of a two-course sequence that can be used to satisfy the College’s core science requirements or can be taken as electives. The first half deals mainly with astrology/astronomy history, optics, instrumentation, the solar system and solar-system space travel. The more advanced course deals with stellar astrophysics, galaxies, cosmology, the search for ET life, UFOs and interstellar travel. Labs include some hands-on experiments, web-based and virtual labs, and those that incorporate NASA data.
Professor Matloff is encouraged by his initial outreach efforts. “Although it will normally function on campus, the portable planetarium could go out on the road,” he explains. “We could, for instance, put on demos in high-school gyms or cafeterias to increase interest in science at City Tech.”
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