In 1987, a consignment of large wooden crates was sent from Japan to the then-three-year-old Kerala State Science and Technology Museum (KSSTM). It arrived about a year later, but only in 1992 were the crates finally opened. Their contents - perforated aluminium sheets for an observatory dome, a GM-II star field projector, glass wool insulation sheets, and packets and packets of noodles. The edible kind.
“The Japanese company, which supplied the planetarium equipment, probably felt that their people - who were to help us with the installation - would not like Kerala food,” said KSSTM director Arul Jerald Prakash, who was senior technical officer at the time. “But obviously they weren’t counting on it taking so long. The equipment was in perfect condition but the noodles had to be thrown away.”
It was another two years - which saw the team from Japan’s Goto Opticals Manufacturing Company working “7 am to 11 pm shifts” with “fantastic tools” - before the Priyadarshini Planetarium was opened to the public in September 1994.
Twenty years and countless shows later, the planetarium - a pet project of KSSTM’s founder-director K Ramachandran Nair - is getting ready to bid goodbye to its horizontal dome, creaky seats, outdated slide projectors and master computer. As it prepares to undergo a `12-crore makeover to enter the digital age, the planetarium is giving up not only its old equipment but also a tedious and soon-to-be-forgotten process of putting up a show. (KSSTM is sending a proposal to the government seeking to close the planetarium down by May end, so that the dismantling of the current dome and equipment can get underway.)
A minimum of 20 lakh people - KSSTM officials said - would have seen the planetarium shows over the years. But only a handful may know of the lengthy processes behind the scenes to make these shows a reality. Sample this - to merely change a show requires at least three people who know what they’re doing to devote two days and a night.
“There are three steps in setting up a show - preparing the multi-slide projectors, the XY moving table (which decides the position and size of the image projected on the dome) and programming the main computer which is the master control,” said planetarium operator Biju R, who has been around since its inception.
The images you see on the dome are a result of picture slides, halogen lamps and optical lenses in various “opto-mechanical” projectors; on the main unit, for example, 31 projectors are just for showing the stars. Apart from the main unit, there are some 60 multi-slide special-effect projectors on the dome periphery. Some images, like that of the skyline, are put together somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle, the individual images generated from smaller projectors on the main unit. The images you see on the dome of the Planetarium are a result of picture slides, halogen lamps and optical lenses in various “opto-mechanical” projectors; on the main unit, for example, 31 projectors are just for showing the stars. “These images must overlap by 10 per cent, only then will they merge and seem like a continuous picture,” said Biju, the operator.
How is this done? Manually. “We have to change the slides in the projectors for each show, align individual projectors and play the visuals one by one to see that there is no flaw,” he said. It takes between 250 and 300 slides per show. And this is just to change a show.
There are two ways the planetarium has acquired its shows - either by buying them from Goto’s Indian branch or making them from scratch. This, like the building of Rome, is not the work of a day. “It takes a month to make a 30 minute show - preparing the storyboard, deciding the visuals, sending them to be developed as slides, recording the audio and so on,” said Biju. “Everything needs to be perfectly timed - how long does it takes to read a sentence in English and to convey the same info in Malayalam.”
The timing is important since it tells the operators when to change visuals and how long to keep one. The audio is recorded separately and has to be matched with the visuals appearing on the dome. “Obviously, the audio can’t be talking about Leo when we’re still showing Cancer,” said Biju.
And that is why each show on at the sky theatre is kept for around four months at a time. However, from keeping the same show for months on end, the planetarium will soon be able to have several up at a time. For, these long-drawn processes and the outdated equipment - the slide projectors, open reel tape deck and the main computer whose floppy drives condemn it to a forgotten era - will soon give way to a tilted dome and new projectors enabling IMAX-equivalent shows.
The old GM-II star field projector, expected to play its swan song sometime in the next two months, will be displayed at the upcoming Astronomy Gallery at KSSTM. “This instrument would have comfortably worked for another two decades, I think. The only fact rendering it ‘obsolete’ is that it is not digital,” said founder-director Ramachandran Nair.