FROM the day it opened, the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium was in show business. In that fall of 1935, both tourists and New Yorkers waited in lines that stretched from the box office to the subway station nearly a block away.
After a couple of years, as the novelty wore off and crowds dwindled, Planetarium Chairman Robert Coles and his staff had to brush up on their showmanship. Not only did they revamp their programs; they also went to work on the halls and lobby. Where visitors once could examine meteorites and look at telescopic pictures of the moon, they can now stop at a bank of scales to compare the weights they would register on various planets. Or they can study the newest exhibit of all: 14 black-light astronomical murals (see opposite page).
Covering nearly 4,000 sq. ft. of wall, the murals are the product of an unusual artistic technique. First, blown-up pictures were projected on the walls. Then, after brushing in a white undercoat, artists painted with fluorescent pigments under black (ultraviolet) light.
In the soft glow, the dead-black background of the murals seems to recede. Saturn with its rings stands out almost in three dimensions, clear and cold and quiet. The waving streamers of the aurora shimmer in a delicate pastel curtain. Flamelike solar prominences erupt from the surface of the sun with more clarity than in the original coronagraph pictures. Nothing seems to stand still: the murals vibrate with energy.
Robot & Time Travel. But for all the innovations, the show has the same star it had on opening night: a giant, two-headed robot studded with shining eyes. On bowed, ladder-like legs, the monster crouches beneath the planetarium's high-arched dome. When the house lights dim in the circular planetarium room, the monster's bright eyes show as points of light reflected from the curved steel ceiling. There, astonishingly real, stretches a boundless universe—a vivid replica of the starbright sky on a clear night.
At a complicated control panel, a lecturer flips switches and makes the monster act. As it turns around an axis parallel to a line between the earth's poles, its projected stars move through the artificial heaven just as the earth's rotation seems to move the real stars overhead. When the monster swings about another axis (perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic), the north pole of the sky seems to move in a circle—the same circle that it makes every 26,000 years. Thus, the lecturer can move the stars through time: turn them back to 3,000 B.C. when Alpha Draconis was the earth's North Star, or look ahead some 120 centuries to see the Southern Cross hover above Manhattan.
By turning the big projector around its horizontal axis, the lecturer can light up the sky with the stars of any latitude. Traveling along a meridian from pole to pole, he can take his audience to the Arctic, or south to see Canopus and the Magellanic Clouds.
Fireballs & Astrophysics. The gift of Charles Hayden, a dapper Boston-born banker (Hayden, Stone & Co.) who made millions speculating in copper, the versatile robot was built at the Zeiss Works in Jena, Germany at a cost of $110,000. When it made its debut, it was the fourth such instrument installed in a U.S. planetarium. There are now six Zeiss planetaria spotted across the country.*