La Voz

Issue date: 10/29/07 Section: Campus

Media Credit: www.deanza.edu/planetarium

Cygnus the Swan is a northern constellation that resembles a swan flying south over the Milky Way Galaxy and is Karl von Ahnen's favorite constellation, for now at least. Von Ahnen, technical director of the newly renovated De Anza College Planetarium, loves astronomy and seeing the excitement on people's faces as they learn about the night sky and discover their own favorite constellation.

De Anza's Planetarium has now become "one of the most modern planetariums in the world," said von Ahnen, thanks to its new Infinium S star projector, the first of its kind in the United States. This next generation star projector uses precision optics to create the most realistic, brightest and tiniest stars, and powerful computers allow it to jump to any time and location, to even give views from another planet.

This is an "age of change" for the planetarium, which not only houses the only star projector of its kind in the world outside of Japan, but also has new seating, a 50 foot seamless dome and an ultra high-resolution All-Dome Digital Video Projection System.

This projection system made by Sky-Skan allows the audience to see representations of neighboring stars and other galaxies. Financial contributions for the renovations have come from state and government funding and fundraising events, including last year's " A Night of Magic." The Konica Minolta company gave De Anza a discount for the projector because of its long lasting relationship with the planetarium.

The planetarium is a "star theater" von Ahnen said, that reproduces the night sky to simulate all sorts of conditions, or the sky at different times and locations. It is a classroom for De Anza students, but also serves the entire community including school children on field trips with its laser shows and astronomy shows.

The main goal is to "inspire people to go out and look at the real stars," and to "inspire curiosity," said Von Ahnen.

Jessica Hinze, a 19-year-old art history major at De Anza, is currently taking solar system astronomy and has her class at the planetarium. "We're pretty honored to have the planetarium," she said because it is much more exciting to learn astronomy in a planetarium instead of a regular classroom. Her favorite constellation is The Big Dipper, a bright constellation that is easy to see in the night sky. She said "it's pretty cool" to be able to look at the night sky and identify the constellations - much more interesting to her than taking a math class.

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