Australasian Planetarium Society

The IPS Fulldome Festival in Brno wrapped up last night with their Gala Evening and the presentation of awards.  The festival has been fantastic and Jiri and his team at the Brno Observatory and Planetarium have done a brilliant job.  So who won?

The Best Educational Production award went to The Man From the 9 Dimensions. A breath taking examination of the elusive nature of a Theory of Everything.

The audience choice award for the Best Movie Award went to Solar Superstorms.

And the final prize of the night, the Festival Director’s Award went to the latest production from the California Academy of Sciences, Incoming!

Congratulations to the winners!

And now onto Warsaw.

  The IPS Fulldome Festival in Brno is now under way.  The Brno Planetarium is a really impressive facility.  Located at the observatory on a hill top above Brno they have two domes.  The larger dome is 17metres,     with a 7 degree tilt, seats 189 and runs an RSA Cosmos system.  The smaller dome is only 6 or 7 metres and uses a optical star projector. The entire facility was completely upgraded around four years ago.  They have done a fantastic job, the planetarium theatres are both really comfortable (excellent seats) and the building is modern and beautifully designed.

One other great feature is their rooftop deck which includes observing telescopes that have a retractable roof.

The festival have been under way and the schedule has been intense.  There are 66 shows (over 26 hours worth) in the competition. And the shows have been running from 9am until 10pm.  What is great to see is that the festival has been so well attended.  The festival organisers have done a fantastic job, and they have managed to get a really good number of sponsors involved.

Today is the last day of the festival and the gala awards will be announced tonight.

Warik Lawrence was interviewed by STEMpunk, Shane Hengst, as part of a campaign in raising the awareness of STEM to the public.  Warik talks about his work at Melbourne Planetarium, Science works as a production designer.  He gives interesting insights into STEM, in particular, how the art of story telling is crucial in communicating simple messages.

What is STEMpunk?
Science outreach from USYD, UTS and UNSW have combined forces to unleash STEM! What is STEM? Why is it important? What are the benefits? Tom Gordon, Christie McMonigal and Shane Hengst discuss topics that they are passionate about in attempt to raise the awareness of STEM to the public. This hopefully will be an ongoing podcast with various guests to help boost the audience numbers and attention.

More information can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/STEMpunkpodcast/

Advanced Immersive Visualisation and Interactive Engagement with DomeLab

DomeLab is the first mobile ultra-high resolution fulldome in Australia. Learn from leading experts Prof. Sarah Kenderdine, Prof. Paul Burke, A/Prof Stefan Greuter and Dr Christopher Barker about the challenges and opportunities of ultra HD fulldome visualisation. The Master class discusses content development methods based on a number of case studies involving film/animation, real-time visualisation and games followed by a tour behind the scenes of Domelab and experience a selected number of Domelab works in a private session.

The Centre for Game Design Research is an interdisciplinary centre for research and the creation of games and playful design interventions based in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Australia. The Centre brings together scholars, artists, designers, engineers and students across Schools and Research Centres at RMIT as well as participants from other Universities and Industry. We design, analyse and critique electronic games and playful activities, to grow our knowledge and appreciation of electronic games and play in modern culture. We also investigate how problems can be solved through the design of new gameful experiences and test these with participants.

WHEN: Monday, 2 May 2016 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM (AEST)

WHERE: RMIT Design Hub – Level 3 Lecture Theatre cnr Swanston and Victoria Streets, Carlton, VIC 3000

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-designing-for-domelab-tickets-23510150493

On Saturday, April 9, the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium hosted a free public session entitled “The Soldier-Astronomer: Thomas Makdougall Brisbane’s Scientific Work.” It was presented by Alison Morrison-Low, who has recently retired as a History of Science Curator at the National Museums of Scotland and is now a Research Associate there. Alison is also a recipient of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts Brisbane Medal. We projected the presentation in three directions on the dome to cater for our concentric seating, while we had the stars visible from the latitude of Sir Thomas’s home in Largs, Scotland, drifting by slowly.

Alison covered the life and work of Sir Thomas Brisbane, touching on his service in the British Army, his nearly being shipwrecked in the West Indies and consequently deciding to learn how to navigate by the stars, his observatories in Scotland and Australia and his influence on the scientific community in the 19th century. She also provided an update on plans to restore Sir Thomas Brisbane’s observatory, which has been cleared of overgrowth since I was in Largs in 2011.

After Alison’s presentation, a just-completed bronze of Sir Thomas Brisbane was unveiled by Brisbane local physiotherapist and sculptor Peter Dornan. Peter had thought about doing a bust of Sir Thomas after he and his wife attended our Valentine’s Day special show last year and I related how one day I would like to see a full-size Sir Thomas outside the Planetarium. Peter completed two copies of the bust – one to keep and one may end up in Brisbane City Council’s City Hall.

Above: Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium Curator Mark Rigby and guest presenter Alison Morrison-Low with the bronze of Sir Thomas Brisbane completed this week. (Images here by Duncan Waldron.)

Above: The bronze of Sir Thomas Brisbane with its creator Peter Dornan.

I still hope that one day, a statue of Sir Thomas will grace the lawn outside of the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium to join our bronze of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Founder of Cosmonautics, which is extremely popular with visitors.

Mark Rigby

DomeLab at the MCIC (Michael Crough Innovation Centre)
Shows during the Michael Crough Innovation Centre exhibition at UNSW

Some photographs from “Look Up Mumbai”, an exhibition of DomeLab.

DomeLab is  the first ultra-high resolution (4K) experimental fulldome in Australia. It is a unique, low-cost display system integrating technical innovation in computing power and graphics capabilities with aesthetic innovation in content delivery. This project is a collaboration between 15 investigators from 11 organisations whose pioneering research is at the forefront of new media art, new museology and digital humanities.

APS2016

4-5 April

Space Place at Carter Observatory, Wellington, NZ

The Milky Way hangs low over Carter Observatory late one night in Wellington, New Zealand.

Well all the conference bags are packed, name badges are printed and we’re pretty much ready to go!

You can find the final version of our info sheet with final schedule at APS info 2016_final.

See you all next week.