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Show f The planetarium's new show explains how ancient mariners blended navigation and astronomy to travel the Pacific. Star show tracks South Seas sailors connecting stars that formed the rafters of a great hut, or created the outline of a trigger fish. People who are not science minded (like me) will follow this only dimly. But the planetarium always takes care to include breathtaking visuals. Here we see an array of star paths slowly streaking across the Hansen dome, representing their yearly progress across the heavens. The program also brings the topic down to a personal level by showing the modern-day navigator Paluwe-lang, Paluwe-lang, who uses the old ways to sail to the island from which his grandfather grand-father emigrated years ago. He is accompanied by his school-educated son, who pipes up with questions and objections that allow the father to explain his science to his boy and to us. The pair reach the island. But on a final note that is a little daring politically, the father reflects that the island is not like it was in this grandfather's time. It has been changed by the white man's coming, the chaos of World War II and the use of the islands as guinea pigs for The Big Bomb. The over-the-shoulder look at nukes is a one of those surprises you occasionally find in a Hansen show. "Islands" is, as always at Hansen, an affable introduction to the heavens. "Islands in the Sky" is presented Monday through Friday at 2, 4:30 and 7 p.m., Saturday at 4:30 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 and 4:30 p.m. by RICK BROUGH Record staff writer Before he died on the shores of the Hawaiian Islands, Captain James Cook pondered a baffling question in the journals of his 18th-century South Seas explorations. How was it he found the same brown-skinned people on islands thousands of miles apart? The evidence indicated an immigration pattern, but how could the natives navigate such distances? The Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City attempts to answer the question in its new star show, "Islands in the Sky." After producing several programs on the astronomical sciences of Europe and the Middle East, the planetarium planetar-ium has turned its attention to the Pacific. The result is a program focused on the sciences, but with touches of the anthropological, historical and even the political. "Islands" shows that while the Europeans used sundials or Stone-henge Stone-henge rocks as methods of astronomy, astron-omy, the islanders devised their own ways. Coral rocks were placed in a circle to represent the positions of the stars in the sky. Pacific sailors calculated their position on the sea by carefully noting the time of year and the position of the stars in the sky. Greeks and Romans may have seen Ursa Major or a goddess in the star shapes. Islanders imagined lines |
