Dr. Ed Krupp, director of Los Angeles's iconic Griffith Observatory, first worked at the observatory as a planetarium lecturer in the 1970s. Today, he directs Griffith during a overhaul of the building and its planetarium theater. Krupp spoke to SPACE.com about the observatory's past, present and future.
SPACE.com: The observatory has been popular for quite some time. How is it holding up?
The observatory celebrates its 65th anniversary this May, and that means 65 years of intense public use. And it has been apparent for many decades and certainly since I first began working here as a lecturer -- 1970 -- that the observatory would need a major infusion of redevelopment simply to continue providing the kind of services to the public that it had been doing for so many decades already the attendance is extraordinary for a place like this. Average of 1.8 million a year now. And as you know really a postage stamp piece of property. That kind of number not only puts in league with major Southern California attractions -- really commercial enterprises like Disney Land and such, but it also means a tremendous wear on a facility that is not a commercial facility, but owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles.
The challenge has been apparent for as long as I've been here to redevelop the observatory, and over those years there has also evolved a kind of picture of what I'd regard as more than simply fixing what's wrong, but in fact thinking imaginatively and thoughtful about the future.
What drove the renovations?
The development of the planetarium theater, that was really the driving force. The current instrument that's in there projecting the stars, really the heart of this facility, is an instrument -- a Zeiss Mark 4 star projector -- that went in 1964. It replaced the first projector that went in in 1935. You can do the arithmetic real fast -- the first projector was in there for 29 years, and we're not up to practically 36 years with the second instrument -- a testimony to Zeiss engineering. But nonetheless, it's operating on a wing and a prayer. That planetarium theater, designed in 1935 with 1935 technology in mind, has been modified over the years, but it's always been piecemeal, and has always been kind of haphazard. By the 1970s, maybe the 80s, we'd done about everything we could do and w couldn't take advantage of new technologies.
Why do today's observatories need sky shows, when telescopes are relatively cheap and accessable?
Star projecting is well worth doing, far more worth doing now than in 1935, because of light pollution. It is now places like this where the stars are preserved like an endangered species, and remind people that there really is a sky to watch. That theater is what tells city people that there's stars out there anymore. It's astounding what these projectors do today. We use hundreds of others of special effects projectors. Now, computerized control equipment makes more and more complex visual and auditory experiences. We are one of the few facilities in the world that still produces and has continuously produced live planetarium programs from the very beginning: a live lecturer who knew astronomy. In an era that finds interactive exhibits very fashionable and the jargon of the day, our idea of interaction is a person talking to a person. We think that's what's really cool interaction. We try to emphasize that value not only in the theater but elsewhere in the museum.
Are planetariums being affected by computer advances?
It is now with digitization that we are seeing two things happening more and more. Standardization of images that do not require identical formats, and the great dream: The last continent of planetaria has always been to find that system they all would share, and therefore share their work, or at least their special effects. Most of the big planetaria are highly idiosyncratic, and that means that their systems for projection were never very well matched. But with digitization, it now no longer matters what people are using. You have the ability to digitize and manipulate.
This has been taken to really quite extreme limits by both the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the new Rose Center Hayden Planetarium in New York, which have opted to present to their audiences real-time experience which involve very expensive and very fast and very impressive computers so that they can maintain a database and run through, in real time, what is going on. We're taking a very different route here. We don't believe that real time is necessary. I'm not even convinced it's desirable. At the heart of this technical difference is real-time presentation versus playback presentation. Suppose you wanted to take your audience on the trajectory approaching Jupiter and swinging through its Galilean satellites. With both the star writer and Rose equipment, provided the database is in the system, you could just say we're going to this and do it live, and you could make changes as you go along. From our perspective on story telling, we are going to be quite satisfied with playback. We don't necessarily need to do it on the fly. We don't necessarily have to have the audience vote on whether we land here or should we land there.
How will you redo the planetarium?
We have planetarium seats that violate the Geneva Convention. Everything that's in that theater is from 1964. It is a concentric room just like it was in 1935. We intend to make some changes with the theater format as well. We, in fact, do have to show things to people, and the whole audience needs to see them. With a concentric arrangement, you're basically telling the audience some of you are not going to see tings very well.
Back in the thirties, there was the star projector in the middle of the room, a bunch of folding chairs, and when they really got fancy, the guy came in with a bunch of lantern slides. As the people running these facilities realized, they could do more. They started simulating things. The trip to the moon was one of the things developed here. This developed story telling techniques in the theater to transport people to these new environments. The vision grew and, in a sense, that's what's continued to happen. The vision has continued to grow more with the desire to tell stories. That's the real core of this theater's existence. It's why people come here.
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