welcome to Abrams Planetarium i'm Dr shannon Schmol astronomer educator and planetarium director abrams Planetarium is a space education resource center located in the middle of Michigan State University's campus in East Lancing Michigan humans have been looking to the sky and using the stars and the motion of the planets and sun and moon to tell time to navigate and to tell stories since the dawn of humanity and every year we continue to make new technology new spacecraft to help us understand what is in our universe i'm here in the lobby where you can see amazing pictures taken with different space telescopes rocks that have fallen from space models of spaceships that astronauts have flown in and even the very first telescope that was on MSU's campus we have a timeline of important figures who have contributed to astronomy from ancient times to today there are a lot of key moments in space history that we can look to to the moon landing in 1969 that's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind to 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope launched and opened a new era of amazingly highresolution images that let us see details we could never see before in 2015 we got our first images of Pluto when the New Horizon spacecraft flew by and gave us the first highresolution images of an object in the outer solar system one thing that we have here in our lobby that is really special is our Vondell Chamberlain Meteorite Gallery named after one of our early directors of the Abrams Planetarium and in this gallery you can come see different rocks that have fallen to Earth from space known as meteorites you could even pick up your own meteorite to take home so what is a meteorite exactly a meteorite is a piece of rock that has fallen from space and has landed on the Earth when it's still a really big rock out in space we call that an asteroid as that rock is falling through our atmosphere and causing a streak of light we call that a meteor and it's not until it lands on the ground that we have a meteorite there are 11 meteorites that have been found here in the state of Michigan and we are the only place you can see a sample of every single one of those Michigan meteorites there's also a piece of the moon a piece of Mars and a piece of the asteroid Vesta that you can come and touch just off the lobby we have the black light gallery filled with amazing paintings made with special reactive paint so that they can glow in the dark so our Blake Gallery leads into the planetarium theater this is our big round room with 141 comfortable seats and a big round dome ceiling around you we have two laser phosphorus projectors that each project on one half of the dome and we do that all through a software and computers in the back called Digistar 7 this software is very special and has lots of data in there from the space telescopes and other facilities that helps us make sure we can recreate an accurate picture of what's going on in space when we go outside and look up at the sky at night what we mostly see are stars and after a while you can start to see patterns you can imagine if you connected the dots between the stars you have a person or an animal or an object and that is a constellation and throughout the year the constellations that we see in the south part of our sky at least here in the northern hemisphere they change throughout the year there's seasonal constellations so what you see in the winter is different than what you'll see in the summer but we also have special constellations we can see in the north these are called circumpolar constellations that we can see every night of the year so we can help you understand how to find those different shapes and recognize the constellations and notice those patterns as they change throughout the year we also produce our sky calendar this is a monthly guide to what's up in the night sky that we've been doing since 1968 it's presented in a calendar format and shows you exactly where the moon and planets and constellations will be that's something you can subscribe to and get mailed out to you every 3 months so you can keep track of what you can see in the night sky astronomy touches upon storytelling history science art and so much more and we have shows here that help us learn about all of those different aspects of astronomy we have programs and planetarium shows for all ages we do shows for school groups and we are open to the public on the weekends once a month we also have sensory friendly shows as well as special shows just for homeschoolers we also have our Spartan Young Astronomers Club that meets each month for younger kids who are really interested in astronomy and want to dive deeper into different topics you can visit aplanetarium.org to plan your visit or subscribe to our sky calendar thank you so much and keep looking up thanks for watching for more videos and lessons be sure to click the subscribe button and be sure to check out the description for links to 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