rose_review_000207 Call me old-fashioned. But as I stood recently in New Yorks Rose Center for Earth and Space, whose creators have billed it as the archetype of a 21st-century planetarium, I missed its predecessor from the 20th century the venerable Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. The Rose Center, which replaces the Hayden at a cost of $210 million, opens to the public on February 19.
In the new Rose Center, the Haydens cozy intimacy has given way to a futuristic sterility.
A gigantic grayish ball called the Hayden Sphere dominates the main enclosure, which is called the Hall of the Universe. The sphere houses a pair of multimedia theaters. Surrounding it, the hall's towering glass walls admit plenty of daylight.
A ramp spirals across the sphere's surface, adding to the striking visual impression. Reviewers have hailed the Rose Center as an architectural achievement -- which it surely is. But when it comes to conveying the wonders of astronomy, the Rose Center is a mixed bag.
First, the good stuff.
The Rose Centers creators have put great effort into modernizing the planetarium experience. Its a place where information is not only up-to-date, but sometimes up-to-the-minute. Displays can be modified to reflect changing theories, and there is a large video screen that will show late-breaking events in astronomy and space exploration.
And the center delivers some memorable experiences. One is a 400-foot-long circular walkway, called Scales of the Universe, that explains the vast range of sizes in the universe in a "powers-of-ten" format. This idea works well, thanks to the clever device of using the Hayden Sphere as a reference for each new size comparison.
One comparison, for example, says to imagine that the 87-foot-diameter sphere is the Sun; Jupiter, the largest planet, is represented by a model 9 feet across. Others span the limits of the microscopic realm -- a raindrop is compared to a red blood cell, a rhinovirus to a hydrogen atom; as well as the macroscopic -- the Virgo Super-cluster of galaxies is compared to the known universe.
Inside the Rose Center for Earth and Space, scale models of Jupiter and Saturn hang next to the Hayden Sphere, which represents the Sun in relative size.
But the most spectacular offering lies within the Hayden Sphere, where visitors experience a simulated flight through our galaxy. Co-written by author Ann Druyan and astronomer Steven Soter, and narrated by Tom Hanks, the half-hour sky show is entitled Passport to the Universe.
A state-of-the-art Zeiss projector creates a virtual fly-through universe, with planets, stars and nebulas in their true relative positions. We head out of the solar system at warp speed, to fly through a breathtaking digital model of the Orion nebula, a place where new stars and planets are being born. I kept reminding myself that I was seeing the universe, not as an artist might imagine it, but as it actually is.
Before returning to Earth -- via a black hole -- we glimpse the largest known structures, formed by chains of galaxies billions of light-years from Earth. Passport to the Universe is truly a 21st century experience.
Still, I cant help feeling theres something missing at the Rose Center something I first discovered almost four decades ago, at the Hayden.
When I was a space-struck kid on Long Island in the 1960s, the Hayden Planetarium was like a second home. Roaming its art-deco expanse, I savored an ongoing communion with the heavens. I still remember how it felt to stand in a darkened hall, confronted by a glowing, wall-sized mural of a cratered moonscape, or the deserts of Mars, or the rings of Saturn.
If the displays werent exactly revolutionary in concept, they were nicely executed. And they were vivid enough to fuel my young imagination on countless journeys through the solar system and beyond.
That approach, however, is apparently as outdated as a transistor radio. The displays in the Hall of the Universe are high-tech theres no shortage of computer-generated graphics but not as compelling as they could be.
For one thing, many of the viewing screens are only a few inches across. There are a number of dish-shaped, five-foot-diameter video screens, whose visuals include a time-lapse movie of the churning surface of the sun. But these, along with the 13-foot AstroBulletin screen devoted to new developments, suffer from the high level of ambient light. In a darker space, I suspect they would have more impact.
But the designers of the Rose Center have consciously avoided creating a series of enclosed viewing areas, or anything else that would disrupt the basic simplicity of the architecture. One exception is the Black Hole Theater, which does a nice job of immersing the viewer in the bizarre conditions thought to exist within and around a black hole.
In contrast, the adjacent Hall of Planet Earth, which opened in June 1999, creates a more intimate and more alluring experience. The hall, whose lighting is subdued, is filled with weird and beautiful slabs of rock from the hidden depths of our planet, most of which are exhibited without any intervening glass. The intimacy of this hall -- you stand face-to-face with geological wonders -- is something I found largely missing in its cosmic counterpart.
Some of the most compelling information in the Hall of the Universe is relatively hidden. The ramp, called the Cosmic Pathway, traces the 13 billion-year evolution of the universe through a timeline illustrated with 220 telescopic photos. It's a great idea, but the images of galaxies remind me of classification photos of seashells -- they're striking, and often beautiful, but you can only look at so many before they become repetitive. The connective tissue for these snapshots -- the story of cosmic evolution -- is contained on a series of touch screens mounted along the ramp. I found myself wondering how many visitors would take the time to use them.
But then, that is the challenge of trying to convey a subject as complex and deep as astronomy to a culture whose attention span has been shaped by video games and MTV. Maybe what I long for in the Hayden's ambience is the slower pace of the era it represented. If so, I've branded myself as a curmudgeon before my time. Maybe today's space-struck kids will find the same sense of wonder at the Rose Center that I found at its predecessor. I hope so; it would be a shame to miss out on what e.e. cummings called "a hell of a good universe next door."
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