the naked eye,” Arnett said. “With Stellarium, we have just developed the ability to zoom in, to use the imagery from the most powerful telescopes on and off the planet and show these images to guests.” Arnett said he is adding images of “super massive black holes at the center of galaxies and incredibly distant quasars. Eventually we will be able to incorporate our movies into Stellarium. The sky is certainly no limit at the SRU Planetarium.” Kylie Lebaroff, a marketing major and physics minor from Slippery Rock, said she was one of those children who gazed at the stars all the time and could locate the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. Her career dream is to “work with the stars in some way.” “I have been very interested in space and the universe since the age of five,” she said. “This has been and will always be my life’s greatest passion. I don’t think I can remember anything I ever loved more than to gaze at the stars.” Growing older, she said she developed an interest in business and managed to mold that to fit her dreams. She said SRU’s planetarium offers brilliant insight into what makes the universe “behave” the way it does. “The Planetarium is a wonderful educational tool as well as a beautiful look into the sky regardless if our own view is blocked by clouds, smoke or even sunlight,” she said. Lebaroff said SRU students are lucky to have a planetarium on campus and a physics department that cares about spreading a love for astronomy.
“The Planetarium reminds me that no matter what I want to do with my life I can find a way to fit my passions into my reality,” she said. Tenzing Lama, a computer science major and physics minor from Nepal, works in the planetarium and received an SRU grant to pursue his interest in astrophotography. “I have been taking pictures of the night sky,” he said. “From the grant, I bought a simple telescope that can be mounted with a digital camera that belongs to the physics department. These pictures can be shown in the Planetarium like a slide show for educational purposes.” He also works with the physics department’s fish eye lens. “This is very useful for when you want to create dome movies or planetarium movies,” he said. “Unlike your regular movies, which are flat and in a rectangular or square shape, dome movies are warped into a dome-shaped screen.” Lama said he is experimenting with various lenses to create images that will help him later design the image sensors on his dream robot. He has also been collaborating with Mukherjee to help her astronomy class program shows using the planetarium star projector machine. “This will create shows for a diverse group of audiences starting with students but including stroke victims, children and prospective students,” he said. Lama said he is passionate about astrophysics because it helps him understand the mechanics of life.
planetarium “
The Planetarium reminds me that no matter what I want to do with my life I can find a way to fit my passions into my reality.
”
– Kylie Lebaroff marketing major and physics minor
www.SRU.edu www.SRU.edu
21 21