Seminar Schedule

Upcoming Planetarians' Zoom Seminars

2025

• 2025 Oct 24 (4th Friday) at 2pm PDT (5pm EDT, 21:00 UT), Showing Off the Solar System To Young School Groups, with Richard Nolthenius.  Hear how the Cabrillo College Planetarium in Aptos, California used a PPA mini grant to upgrade their AV capabilities with a new laptop computer and software to present the latest spacecraft images from NASA’s growing visitations to our planetary neighbors. The classic A3P system now has an LCD projector to the dome ceiling, and kids can watch the stars circle and also enjoy close-ups of Mars and Pluto and other remarkable sites NASA has visited, together with engaging stories about e.g. the “Happy Face Crater” and the giant nitrogen “Heart” on Pluto. After Richard's talk, we'll have a free-form discussion about school programs with input from any and all seminar attendees. Richard Nolthenius is chair of the Department of Astronomy at Cabrillo College, and active member of the Earth Futures Institute at UC Santa Cruz. He is an active observer of asteroid occultations (helping to determine the shapes and masses of asteroids) and a discoverer of a new moons -- one around the asteroid Martschmidt and one around the first Kuiper Belt Object (50000) Quaoar. Richard was part of the NASA ground team for the Hayabusa I Mission in Australia. His work also focuses on climate change and related societal issues. He was co-author of the 2019 Amazon best-seller “Climate Abandoned”.

• 2025 Nov 21 (3rd Friday), Planetarium Educators Workshop, Module 2: A Framework for Examining Planetarium Programs, with Alan Gould. This is module 2 in a nine-module series based on the Planetarium Educator's Workshop Guide (https://www.ips-planetarium.org/page/pass#1). We can summarize what we learned in Module 1 and then build on a discussion about planetarium show topics that was in our Aug 29 PZS, Cosmic Creations! with Bob Bonadurer and Terry Spears. We revisit "Topics" and then extend our discussion to two other key elements of Planetarium Programs: "The Student (or visitor)" and "The Instructor (or presenter/facilitator)".  That triumvirate of elements, Topic-Student-Instructor, is a useful framework for developing planetarium programs. Six years ago (2019) we held workshops dealing with the first three modules in the series but this year we're returning to and resuming our work in this realm. Please join in and help make our discussions significant and currently relevant to our beloved profession. 

• 2025 Dec 12 (2nd Friday) at 2pm PDT (5pm EDT, 22:00 UT), People Management for the Planetarium with Mary Holt. As Planetarians advancing in our careers we typically find ourselves in the position of managing people. I am a new manager very interested in learning how to be successful managing people throughout my career. In this presentation I will discuss my experience as a new people manager, but also share insights from interviews with over a dozen Planetarians with a wide variety of experience levels and management styles about their experiences managing and being managed. I will explore themes common across our field and suggest some potential areas of success and improvement for fellow managers. Mary Holt has worked at The Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley California since June 2024. Before that she was at California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco for about 8.5 years. Her family is from the Bay Area but she grew up in Michigan and attended college at University of Michigan, which is where her planetarium career started back in 2010. 

2026

Dates and times subject to alteration depending on availability of presenters.

• 2026 Jan 30

• 2026 Feb 27

• 2026 Mar 27

• 2026 Apr 24

• 2026 May 29

• 2026 Jun 26