Rauch Planetarium

The original Rauch Planetarium dating from the early 1960's could accomodate about 50 adults or 80 children for night sky shows.  It's primary audience was K-12 school children brought on field trips to the campus by their teachers.  When the building was demolished on short notice following an agreement between the University and the Speed Art Museum over land use, former visitors raised public interest and the Gheens Foundation donated funds for a new facility. 

The Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium seen  from the University of Louisville's School of Music on the morning of the 2012 vernal equinox.

The new Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium was designed to educate  visitors about astronomy, and while its operation followed the then traditional "edutainment" model, the building incorporated timeless design elements.   Its garden wall is a clock casting a light pattern marking the passage of hours and seasons.  The top view is at winter solstice, and the bottom view is at summer solstice.  The tall slot marks solar noon which at Louisville occurs about 44 minutes after noon Eastern Standard Time on the day of the summer equinox, with a variation through the year that is a consequence of Earth's elliptical orbit, the tilt of Earth's axis to its orbital plane, and Louisville's longitude. Few visitors were aware of the feature.

Inside the wall there are sundials, lost temporarily within plantings that, neglected since its closure to the public,  have grown too tall and currently  hide these time keeping features.  The scale of the circular wall is matched by circles embedded in the floor showing the sizes of the planets compared to the Sun represented by the enclosing wall itself.  The model includes Pluto, which was still designated as a planet when the planetarium was built.  Today it is called a dwarf planet, in the same category as nearby Ceres, which is not modeled.

A solar telescope was an early addtion to outside activity area.  It was designed by John Kielkopf and constructed in the University's Physics & Astronomy instrument shop.  The equatorial mount allows visitors to point it at the Sun and see a bright sharp projected image of the Sun's disk fill the screen at the base of the transparent lower tube.  The clear lower tube prevents an inadvertent direct view of the Sun, and a window on the front aperture seals the interior from weather.  Within the gold exterior a 6-inch refracting telescope collects the sunlight and creates the image.

When the planetarium first re-opened,  its star projector was  a conventional ball with lenses and holes that created a simulation of the sky on the planetarium dome by projecting an image of a small bright arc lamp that was centered within the ball.  A complex system of mirrors, gears, and motors recreated planetary motions on the dome, and the planetarium operator could set up a sky for any year and time.  With over 4000 stars on the ball and a very dark theater, the effect was realistic and served to teach the night sky  and train students in celestial navigation too.  Eventually the manufacturer could not maintain it, and as in most planetariums today, the opto-mechnical projector   was replaced by digital technology.   The star ball is suspended from the ceiling of the lobby and display area having served for nearly 50 years.  Modern digital projectors have useful lifetimes of 5 to 10 years.

A spendid educational exhibit of meteorites donated by Mary Ann Russell offers visitors a close up look and a chance to touch  material left from the formation of the Sun's planets 4.6 billion years ago.

The interior of the planetarium features forward-faced seating, surround sound, and full-dome projection of the sky as seen from Earth or from space.