In this classic, now digitized show, you’ll see how the Wright Brothers developed and flew their first airplane. With a delightful interview style presentation, the show covers the principles of flight and the story behind the first flight in 1903. This show was created to commemorate 100 years of powered flight by Dayton’s Boonshoft Museum of Discovery and was first presented by the BGSU Planetarium in 2004. This planetarium show is being presented as part of the special July AMERICA 250 IN THE PLANETARIUM series and will follow a Speakers Series public talk. AMERICA 250 IN THE PLANETARIUM programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, July 13–31. Public lectures will begin at 7:30 p.m. Planetarium shows will follow at 8:45 p.m. Weather permitting, public stargazing will follow around 9:45 p.m.  

Celebrate American discovery, innovation, and values through topics in astronomy, history, art, music, and more in this special nine-part series in the BGSU Planetarium. This America 250 in the Planetarium series of programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays starting at 7:30 p.m. July 13–31. All America 250 in the Planetarium programs are free and open to the public. In this final program in the series, Founding Voices Under the Stars, you will experience the reading of seminal American documents such as the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, among others, under the night sky of the day they were signed. This program will also feature live fife and drum music performed by the Fort Meigs Field Music, featuring John Thompson on fife and Isaac Rapai on drum. This program will be followed by the planetarium show THE WRIGHT WAY TO FLY at 8:45 p.m.

  In this classic, now digitized show, you’ll take a trip with Lewis and Clark along the route they followed in exploring the American west over 200 years ago, with emphasis on how they used the sky to navigate and record their route. This show was originally presented at the BGSU Planetarium in 2007. This planetarium show is being presented as part of the special July AMERICA 250 IN THE PLANETARIUM series and will follow a Speakers Series public talk. AMERICA 250 IN THE PLANETARIUM programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, July 13–31. Public lectures will begin at 7:30 p.m. Planetarium shows will follow at 8:45 p.m. Weather permitting, public stargazing will follow around 9:45 p.m.  

Celebrate American discovery, innovation, and values through topics in astronomy, history, art, music, and more in this special nine-part series in the BGSU Planetarium. This America 250 in the Planetarium series of programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays starting at 7:30 p.m. July 13 – 31. All America 250 in the Planetarium programs are free and open to the public. This eighth talk in the series, The Universe as Model:  Alexander Calder’s Mobile Sculptures in American Art History, will be presented by Andrew Hershberger, Professor, BGSU School of Art. Starting in the early 1930s and continuing throughout his life, the American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) created a remarkable body of sculptures that he called “mobiles.” Unlike most, if not all, earlier sculptures in art history, Calder’s mobiles actually moved and often rotated on a variety of axes. Perhaps the innovative and mechanical aspects of these mobile sculptures caused the French artist Fernand Leger (1881-1955) to describe them as “100 percent American” (in Miller, et al, 2018, p. 432). Calder himself proclaimed of the mobiles that the “underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe” (in Fineberg 2022, p. 52). With those words, Calder shared the inspiration he received from the way planets revolve around stars, and the way moons revolve around planets, etc. Calder restated his main inspiration this way: “I felt there was no better model for me to choose than the Universe” (as quoted by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). Connecting to the theme of innovation in this America 250 lecture series, Calder has often been hailed as the inventor of moving sculptures. Indeed, Calder’s mobile sculptures have been described as a “radical innovation” that transformed the ancient definition of sculpture to its very roots (Fineberg 2022, pp. 53-55). Thus, Calder’s mobiles fit the theme of American discovery and innovation while also connecting to the discipline of astronomy. The talk will be followed by the planetarium show NAVIGATING WITH LEWIS & CLARK at 8:45 p.m. 

  From the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to early human spaceflight to the Moon of the 1960s to today’s International Space Station. See the Moon landings as never before and peek at possible future missions to Mars in this immersive, historically accurate reconstruction of Humankind’s first steps into space in the fulldome video show, DAWN OF THE SPACE AGE. This planetarium show is being presented as part of the special July AMERICA 250 IN THE PLANETARIUM series and will follow a Speakers Series public talk. AMERICA 250 IN THE PLANETARIUM programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, July 13–31.  Public lectures will begin at 7:30 p.m. Planetarium shows will follow at 8:45 p.m. Weather permitting, public stargazing will follow around 9:45 p.m.  

Celebrate American discovery, innovation, and values through topics in astronomy, history, art, music, and more in this special nine-part series in the BGSU Planetarium. This America 250 in the Planetarium series of programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays starting at 7:30 p.m. July 13 – 31. All America 250 in the Planetarium programs are free and open to the public. This seventh talk in the series, Glass Astronomers:  Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler in American Opera, will be presented by Ryan Ebright, Associate Professor, BGSU College of Musical Arts. The American composer Philip Glass is perhaps most famous for his bicentennial opera Einstein on the Beach, a groundbreaking collaboration with avant-garde director Robert Wilson that was loosely inspired by the life and ideas of physicist Albert Einstein. Among Glass’s more than two dozen subsequent operas, scientists are recurring subjects, including two seventeenth-century astronomers whose work revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe. In this multimedia presentation, we will discover how space and those who study it are dramatized musically in Glass’s operas Galileo Galilei (2002) and Kepler (2009). The talk will be followed by the planetarium show DAWN OF THE SPACE AGE at 8:45 p.m.