【慢】PlanetariumsTakeViewersonaTripThroughSpace.docVIP

STEVE EMBER: Im Steve Ember. BARBARA KLEIN: And Im Barbara Klein with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. A planetarium is a theater with a rounded ceiling onto which images of the stars and planets are projected. Planetariums give educational shows about astronomy and what you can see in the night sky. Today, we tell about the past, present, and future of planetariums. And, we visit the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (MUSIC) STEVE EMBER: Since ancient times, humans have worked on ways to understand and represent the movement of the stars and planets. Experts credit the Greek astronomer Archimedes with developing the earliest known device to show the daily movement of the planets. He lived more than two thousand years ago. These mechanical devices that show the relative placement and movement of the planets and moons are sometimes called orreries. Over the centuries, scientific thinkers worked to develop these devices and improve their accuracy and complexity. The words orrery and planetarium were once used interchangeably. Today, the world planetarium generally means a theater inside a dome. BARBARA KLEIN: The earliest planetarium that is still working today is in the Netherlands, although the device is actually an orrery. It was built by a man named Eise Eisinga starting in seventeen seventy-four. It took him seven years to build this moving device inside a room in his house. All the planets move at the same speed as the real planets in our solar system. So, it takes one year for Earth to move around the sun and about twenty-nine years for Saturn to do so. Eisinga made his device out of wood, metal nails, a clock and nine weights. planetarium-friesland.nl The oldest working planetarium was built by Eise Eisinga in the Dutch town of Frankston Other versions of early planetariums were large globes. People could sit inside them. Holes were cut into the walls of these globes to represent stars. STEVE E