Auroriums for Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau

In the space of an hour, the summer sun rises in the north and swings around the horizon to dip again below the hills off to the north; the sky grows dark and the stars come out; the winter sun peeks above snow-clad mountains, scoots a few degrees westward and sets again; finally the aurora comes out to flash across the Big Dipper and paint colors across the darkened sky from horizon to horizon.

A fanciful impossibility? Not quite. The technology now exists to build in Alaska special viewing rooms that go beyond conventional planetariums. The starting point is a conventional planetarium consisting of a 30- to 40-foot diameter hemispherical dome beneath which 60 people could sit comfortably. Commercially available systems can project onto the inside of the dome images of the stars and the planets. Also commercially available are projectors that display cloud patterns and other sky scenes (the so-called atmospherium).

The next step is convert the planetarium and atmospherium into what we might call an "aurorium". To build an aurorium--something that has not yet been done effectively--requires the use of state-of-the-art technologies developed at the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute and by Japanese industrial concerns.

Over the past 15 years scientists at the Geophysical Institute developed television technology enough to permit taking real-time color movies of auroras; an impossible task with conventional photography. Japanese technologists with minor help from the Alaskan scientists built new experimental devices to allow protection of the auroral films onto domes to create lifelike auroral images.

The next step, suggested by an informal committee of University of Alaska faculty, is to build auroriums. The group suggests that three of these uniquely Alaskan facilities be built, one in Anchorage and one in Fairbanks and one in Juneau. The cost is not small, but neither is the educational and entertainment potential of such facilities.