Episode 128: Seeing the Skies in Storrs!

UConn is the home to the oldest planetarium in the state of Connecticut as it was originally built in 1954. The facility underwent extensive renovations in 2023-24, led by the efforts of assistant professor of physics in residence Matt Guthrie. Guthrie worked with a number of different areas of campus on the project, which includes a new projector, new seating and a surround sound system. The building has also been renamed in honor of Cynthia Peterson, who served as the planetarium’s director for 35 years. Matt tells us about the shows at the planetarium and how you can come and see one! He also chats about renovations to a little-known observatory on the outskirts of campus.

Link to Episode 128 at Podbean

Mike: Well, hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 podcast. I’m Mike Enright from University Communications, joined as always by Izzy Harris. Hi Izzy.

Izzy: Hey Mike, how’s it going?

Mike: Good. A little quiet on campus these days with final exams going on.

Izzy: Quiet, chilly, windy.

Mike: Winter’s here.

Izzy: It is.

Mike: We have a lot of bright, shiny new buildings on campus, and one of them has been with us for a while: the UConn Planetarium. It’s right here on North Eagleville Road, ironically, across from University Communications, if anyone ever comes and visits us. It’s, I think, the oldest planetarium in the state, but it’s been dormant for a while. And Matt Guthrie, in his role in the Department of Physics, has kind of taken this up as a crusade, and the planetarium is back in action.

Izzy: We love to hear that.

Mike: We love to hear that. So, Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt: Hey, it’s great to be here.

Mike: So, I’m sure many of our listeners have been to a planetarium, especially as a kid, probably on a school trip. But tell us what a planetarium exactly is and the history of the one here at UConn.

Matt: A planetarium has taken on, over the last five to seven decades or so, a role as a teaching and learning facility for astronomy.

Matt: The way that a planetarium works is that there is some kind of projector in the center of a room that’s shaped like a globe, a bowl, or an upside-down cereal bowl. The projector shows, depending on how old it is, images or just really small white dots that are supposed to represent stars. Our planetarium here had a really old projector, designed in the ’50s, and it was like that for a few decades until about a year ago.This projector was only able to show the location of stars. The globe at the center rotated to make the stars move. It also had a little module that showed the location of planets. So, it goes from very basic to super advanced with multiple digital projectors, a bunch of different modules, and surround sound systems. We’re not quite there at our planetarium, but we’re getting there.

Izzy: Well, it still sounds like a major upgrade.

Matt: Yeah. When I first got there, it was almost exactly two years ago. The building had been shut down for about five years at that point. It was just like a storage facility for old planetarium and astronomy equipment. I was kind of surprised because the planetarium was actually the first building that I saw when I first visited campus. I thought, wow, that’s cool. They have a planetarium. But then I started learning a little bit more about it, and nobody ever used it. It turns out there’s a reason for that—it’s because nobody knew how, and all the stuff inside of it was broken. So, I toured it, and I said, yeah, I have a little bit of time, I want to try to get this place working again. But it took a little bit more effort than that.

Izzy: Well, we really appreciate your dedication to bringing this vision to life. How did you first become interested in astronomy?

Matt: That’s a really great question.

Matt: I grew up in Chicago, and in Chicago, when you look up, you basically don’t see anything. It’s just complete light pollution. Everything is washed out by the lights of the city. But in first grade, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Donaldson, rented an inflatable planetarium and set it up in the library.

Matt: An inflatable planetarium is like this portable balloon that is about 20 feet wide. You hook up a big fan to it, and at the center, there’s this little rotating cylinder that shows the positions of the stars. You can set the time and date, and it will show you what the sky looks like at that time.That just blew my mind as a kid. It changed the way that I think about basically everything. That’s probably how I first got interested in astronomy. Then I went a little bit on other paths, became a teenager, started to not care about stuff, and then advanced a little further and realized that there’s really cool stuff out there.

Matt: I wanted to learn more about it, so, I got back into astronomy.

Mike: Tell us a little bit about the actual work that had to be done at the UConn Planetarium. It sounds like it was probably a lot of construction and a lot of cooperation with different parts of campus.

Matt: Yeah, it’s hard to think back and really remember all of what needed to be done. The main thing that I was involved in was coordination, figuring out what was the major work. The first thing is the projector. When I got there, the projector was just completely—some of it worked, but the really important parts didn’t. We didn’t know anybody here who was able to make it work again because Cynthia Peterson—she retired and then passed away in 2020—was really the only person with the historical memory of how to run this projector. If you’re really interested, you can actually go visit the projector. It’s on display in the physics department.

Izzy: Oh, wow.

Matt: We wanted to preserve it because it’s such an important piece of history. Cynthia made this thing her own. She put on custom-made modules. She worked with our department’s machinist to create a bunch of really cool, totally custom things. Nobody else has them. The first thing we needed to do was replace this old, amazing projector with something that we could actually use. So, I did a lot of research and contacted a bunch of companies. There’s really only one company that makes projectors for a dome of this size because it’s the oldest planetarium in the state and one of the smallest. It’s the smallest permanent planetarium in the state. So, we’re working with a size of planetarium that people just don’t make anymore because it doesn’t accommodate as many people as want to visit a planetarium. We were really looking for specific kinds of projectors—projectors that are really only made for portable planetariums. But they’ve advanced a lot in the 20 or 25 years since I visited my first inflatable planetarium. Now they have real projectors that are digitally controlled by computers, and a lot of really cool software goes into our new projector. The first thing I needed to decide was how do we get the heart of this place running again? So, I was talking to a few other professors and my department head. They said, yeah, you can just write a letter to the dean of the college, and she’ll weigh in on it.So, I wrote a letter, my department head signed it, and we heard back a few weeks later that she approved the funding for revitalizing the planetarium. So, we got some money. It took about a year to buy the projector. We were researching chairs and seating. We wanted the new place to be accessible. The old seats were just foldable steel chairs or a kind of hodgepodge of random seating that had been collected over 50 years or so. We wanted to replace that and make it look really nice. We also wanted to put carpeting down. The floor was just bare concrete, and it was kind of ugly. One of the worst problems that we had to confront was that the roof leaked. Every time it rained, water would get in. I don’t know when this started to happen. I was working with facilities, and our facilities manager, Brett Demarchi, was a huge resource for this. He knew basically every group that needed to be contacted to get what we needed done. So, our first job was also getting the roof fixed. What they eventually did was just caulk every seam in the dome. They tried to patch it, but it didn’t work. So, they went on top of the roof, got about a hundred, maybe two hundred bottles of caulk, and sealed up every seam on the roof. Eventually, no more leaks.

Izzy: That would be a problem for a planetarium, I’d think.

Matt: Yeah, you certainly don’t want any water dripping in there.

Izzy: Backpedaling a little bit, you mentioned Cynthia. It sounds like she was an incredibly intelligent woman, and it’s amazing that the planetarium gets to continue on and live in her honor. Have you had any shows yet? And what are your future plans for the shows? Will it be open to the public or just the university?

Matt: So, we’ve had a few random shows. Over the summer, there was a summer camp for blind and visually impaired students that was run by Noreen Grice. She actually directed a planetarium in Boston for, I think, 30 years. She took the reins of our planetarium. She gave us a show script. We projected the images, and one of the grad students I’m working with, Kelsey Davis, was driving that show while Noreen was narrating. It was awesome to see her work. She knows what to describe and how to talk about these things to people who—some of them can see, but some of them are completely blind. For the people who were completely blind, she had braille books that she distributed to them, and everyone else was able to see at least some of what was being shown on the screen. I can’t think of a better first show for us. It was transformative and really instructive for me to see what it was like to narrate a show like that.

Mike: Do you envision a day where you have regular shows at the planetarium?

Matt: Yeah. Since the summer, we have been hosting kind of random groups—people who contact me and say that they want to visit and see what’s going on. We take this as an opportunity to fine-tune our shows or test out the equipment we’re just bringing up.

Matt: We’ve hosted groups like the local Cub Scout troop, astronomy clubs, and an astronomy class from EO Smith High School. We’ve also had a bunch of random groups of people who are interested in astronomy and don’t mind that we’re ramping up our capacity.In the spring, I’m hoping to host at least two public shows per week.

Mike: If people wanted to find out more about the planetarium or maybe bring their group, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Matt: The best way to get in touch with me is through email. You can just Google “UConn Planetarium.” We have a website on the physics homepage.

Matt: We also have an Instagram page. If you search for “UConn Planetarium,” you’ll find us there. We have a few people working with us who are probably monitoring the DMs, but email is probably the best way.

Izzy: Good to know. Matt, I’d love to hear about some of your other work on campus. I hear that you’ve also worked on bringing an older observatory back to life near campus. What are these efforts like?

Matt: The planetarium was the first project that I took on, but the progress on it was really slow because a lot of the work was just stuff we couldn’t do on our own. We had to wait for facilities to have a place in their schedule. Ordering things takes a really long time here, especially if you’re ordering expensive things. The observatory kind of happened in parallel, and they’re totally unrelated other than it’s just me who is running the show. Our observatory—a lot of people ask me about the one on the science building, on Gant—has been shut down for about as long as the planetarium was. There are no telescopes inside of it right now. I’m told there is asbestos tiling inside of it, so, it’s probably not going to be reopened. I’m trying to save the dome, but that is also taking a little bit of work. Then there’s another observatory that I didn’t know about when I came here, and very few people I talked to knew about its existence. It’s about two miles south of campus on the UConn Plant Science Farm. It was called the East Road Observatory. I don’t know if it has an official name, but I found a few documents from Cynthia Peterson—who also built this observatory—and she just called it the East Road Observatory because the access road to it was East Road. That access road has since shut down because it’s been overgrown by the forest. The gate doesn’t open, and there are a lot of issues that go along with this observatory. It’s a research observatory with a big telescope inside that has a focal length of about four meters. The main mirror inside the telescope is 16 inches wide, so, it has a huge amount of light collection power. But it had also been shut down for about 25 years. When I first visited the observatory, I thought, this is really cool, but I have no idea what to do with this. About a month later, it was kind of fate—some random guy emailed my department head and said he wanted to donate a telescope that he had made. I met with him, and it turns out he’s an award-winning telescope designer. He makes his own telescopes, fabricates the metal, grinds the glass for the mirrors—he does all this really cool stuff—and he wanted to work with us. He still has this telescope that he’s waiting to donate to us. We just don’t have anywhere to put it.I visited the observatory with Alan Hall (the telescope designer), my department head Barry Wells, and facilities manager Dave Perry. Alan looked at the telescope and said, “This is a lost cause. Don’t even worry about it. This is trashed.” Over 25 years, squirrels, spiders, mice—just about everything you can think of in the middle of a forest—had moved into the observatory. But then we got to talking and decided to see what we could do. About a week later, we started taking it apart, and over the next nine months, we completely deconstructed the telescope, repaired it, and updated whatever could be updated. The bones of the telescope are still from the ’70s. About a year ago, on October 28, we reopened the observatory. We’ve been going out there about once a week. We bring small groups and can host slightly larger groups if we get at least four weeks’ notice. On clear nights, like last week, we were looking at Saturn, a few nebulas, and deep sky objects like clusters.

Mike: So, I’m a very amateur user of the astronomy apps on my phone. Based on my knowledge, I’ve read that the winter sky is much more interesting than the summer sky. Is that true?

Matt: It really depends on what you’re interested in. In our view at the observatory, there are a lot more nebulas visible during the winter.

Mike: What’s a nebula?

Matt: A nebula is just a general term for something that’s a diffuse, extended object in the galaxy. Usually, they’re hot gas and dust. They can be many different colors. For example, the Orion Nebula, if you look at it in visible light, is brown, purple, and red. It looks really cool. There’s also the very famous “Pillars of Creation” photo taken by the Hubble Telescope. It shows massive jets of gas in blue and yellow—that’s a nebula. Basically, anything that isn’t a comet, star, or planet in the sky can fall under the category of a nebula.

Izzy: It sounds like all of your hard work, dedication, and a lot of patience have paid off, and there are some exciting things in store for UConn’s observatory and planetarium.

Izzy: To kind of sum everything up, why do you think it’s important to teach people about astronomy?

Matt: That’s a big question. My main motivation for sharing astronomy with others is that it’s the most humbling experience you can have on Earth. Looking at the cosmos reminds you that there’s so much more out there that’s bigger than us. The amount of impact we can have on the universe as humans is basically zero. The universe will do what it’s going to do, whether we’re here or not. We are nothing compared to the vastness of the cosmos. That perspective motivates me to do better, to help others, and to be a good person. I think if more people experienced the wonder and awe of looking at space—at planets, at galaxies, at the stars—I think the world would be a better place.

Mike: That sounds like a good reason to me.

Izzy: It sure does. I’m feeling a little sentimental now.

Mike: I am too. And speaking of sentimental, it’s time for a little holiday break for us.

Izzy: That’s true. It’s that time of year.

Mike: It’s that time of year again. We’ll be back with another podcast on January 8th. We’d like to wish all our loyal listeners a very happy holiday season and a very happy New Year. Matt, thank you for joining us today, and happy New Year to you.

Matt: It’s great to be here.

Mike: And Izzy, as the saying goes, we’ll talk to you next year.

Izzy: Sounds good, Mike.

Mike: Thanks for joining us on the podcast today.