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As if the original projector were not complicated enough, Chairman Coles and his staff have festooned it with added gadgets manufactured in basement workshops. They can simulate an eclipse of the sun, complete with corona and Baily's beads. They can work up their own thunderstorms: dark clouds move across the dome as lightning flickers and thunder rumbles in the public address system. Added switches on the control panel can send a shower of meteors drifting down the sky. Fireballs flash and explode overhead.
All these new effects are carefully planned to fit into new lectures, more dramatic shows. Today's audiences can even be taken on a rocket to the moon. Lecturers, of course, have had to brush up on their astrophysics to keep pace with the frightening scientific sophistication of juvenile space travelers.
Every month there is a different performance. Chairman Coles and his crew are always busy building more gadgets, newer effects. And their showmanship is paying off. Last year they taught some quarter of a million visitors a little of their own enthusiastic interest in the awesome immensities of space.
*Others are in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Chapel Hill, N.C.