Season 1-03 - Domes

Say, Hello, this is Gary Likert episode three of a home Planetarium in your own back yard. It's that Canvas sky or talking about today from an overhead perspective. That is from the 10,000 foot view. sky glows horizons infinity. The dome has a very odd job. It's something that represents nothing. It's something finite that represents infinity. Last year, we were lucky enough to go to London my family and I and we went in of course the biggest dome around St. Paul's Cathedral and up in the whispering gallery where acoustics played tricks on you they would go all the way around the dome. The dome is a very special construct. It's been around forever. The Romans were pouring concrete making bricks or wooden domes there are halftones full domes. The Half Dome, oddly enough was considered ideal for monks chanting and early cathedrals. Whereas preaching required a flat ceiling up above the preacher. So it was kind of a combination there. Halfway up a dome is called the haunch. you've ever wondered about being back on your haunches, you don't hear that much anymore. The horizon from ground level about three miles distant. If you look out to see the sea closest to the horizon is called the offing. Perhaps you've heard the expression, there's adventure or battle in the offing. That's where that comes from. So Domus, Greek or Latin for House, is where we get the word. There are many types of domes. As mentioned there are halftones full domes, planetariums went to tilted domes. Early planetariums even had rotating domes with perforated surfaces and backlit so that the stars actually just shone through for you to see as it rotated above the gentlemen and Mississippi until recently had one like this with glow in the dark stars painted as well. But we are projecting stars the Milky Way, sunsets, sunrises onto this dome. So it's up there to size shouldn't really matter. Some will say a big dome is better. Others first small domes, wooden brick, whatever you make about of I've made them out of cardboard, plastic sheeting like table coverings. I make them lightweight usually, although I've had a 15 foot dome way out in my backyard behind the barn for years. Whatever It's some kind of projection surface. You can use your ceiling, the side of your garage, the size of your barn. Anything really. But remember, with the dome, you are literally bringing infinity and forever down to earth so that you can use it in your planetarium out in your backyard. This is Gary Likert thanks for listening.

Season 1-02 - Silhouettes

Hello, this is Gary Likert. Today we're gonna talk about silhouettes. Now silhouettes originated with Etn silhouette, a French politician in the 1700s, who got a reputation for being extremely cheap, clamped down on his people with all these cost saving measures. And so the silhouette was born simply a black profile. And that's basically what we're talking about doing here with the planetarium in your own back yard. Recently, my son said, Dad, I loved your planetarium back when I was a kid in the 90s were the little buildings you had. He didn't remember the stars. He remembered the little houses and buildings around the edges of the horizon. The silhouette around your horizon and your planetarium gives perspective. It gives a feeling of size like a giant stalking across the heavens. Without the silhouette. You don't have anything to compare the star patterns with. There's no cut offs. There's no nothing in the twilight that slowly fades. No little lights that might come on out of planetariums have this problem right up to the Adler the famous Adler back in the 60s. I remember stars on my chest, they didn't even have a cut off mechanism that was in an operation at that time, even though they did have the beautiful Chicago skyline. So really, a silhouette gives an impression gives a perspective, you can have the ocean, you can have cliffs coming down to the ocean doesn't take much back I like to combine those two items gives you a partial glimpse of something more that suggested partial constellations are dramatic. You can guess what they are. You can see just some of them. You can have flat versus three dimensional dark versus vided urban versus rural scenes. I would not recommend projecting horizon because it's just too modern. So that's my subject for today silhouettes thank you

Season 1-01 - Its Only a Paper Moon

The sky. So it's Gary Likert Welcome to it's only a Paper Moon under a canvas sky. Otherwise known as the building a planetarium in your backyard podcast. I selected that song because it's everyone knows sitting in a planetarium. It's not real and yet, your mind can drift away you can be fooled by that illusion. So taking that to the extreme, this song kind of encapsulated that people used to go to county fairs and sit in large paper moons to give the illusion that they were floating in space among the stars. Even though you could see the stars right through the moon. And Canvas sky. Well, Canvas was a popular maybe it still is backdrop for photographers. You know it had the light blocking aspect, the reflective ability you could paint it, so it was popular for photographers as a backdrop, and muslin. They mentioned Muslim is a plain woven cotton. So you had trees made of cotton and the stars by cutting off the canvas with a paper moon hanging in the sky. The song itself was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg with some help from Billy rose. ARLEN and Harburg are more famous for a song from Wizard of Oz. Little something called Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Perhaps you've heard Judy Garland sing that Billy rose must have added something he was more famous for being the husband of Fanny Brice, who was a American, median and singers. If you believe in me was the first title but it was changed to pay for a moon that originally came out and 32 in a flop Broadway production called the Great Magoo. It then appeared in another movie the year later. But it wasn't really considered a Jazz Pop standard until after World War Two it was revived by everybody. Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, met King Cole, most famously in my book, revived the song and it's now definitely a standard. So today, we celebrate or I do at least that song from 1933. Of course, it was a very popular 1973 film as well. We won't get into that. Anyway, it does conjure that atmosphere, that atmosphere of well, I know this is fake. And though it's phony, as people used to say things are phony, but if I suspend the lead, if I believe in the presenter, I can just almost think that I am actually looking at the real sky and just be taken away to wherever my dreams would take me. So welcome again to the podcast. I hope you enjoy it. You'll have very short episodes. Might be some surprises little way down the line. But again, I'm Gary Likert and welcome