Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Second Day in Montreal: "A Very Analog Experience"
I had told my business companion that I was interested in taking in a show at the Montreal Planetarium. I had checked the times for the shows before coming to town, and found an English-language presentation on star evolution starting at 7:15pm. Since my associate is similarly interested in science topics (yes, I can claim him as a fellow card-carrying member of the geek fraternity), and hadn't taken in a planetarium show since at least before the McLaughlin Planetarium closed more than 10 years ago in Toronto, he agreed to accompany me there after dinner.

We had a brief and overpriced meal at the hotel restaurant (charging $3.25 for a glass of Pepsi just strikes me as wrong), then zipped off to the planetarium by cab to ensure that we would make it on time.

We bought our tickets (a very reasonable $8), and with maybe two dozen other people total we soon set ourselves down in the comfortably steeply-angled seats of the planetarium, gazing upon the mid-1960s's era Zeiss projector, an electro-mechanical device from another time.

This was appropriate since the show was pretty much everything I remembered from taking in previous shows at the old McLaughlin planetarium back home a dozen or more years ago. Dozens of slide projectors madly clicked and whirred away, projecting hand-made landscapes of alien worlds and a clearly painterly and almost romantically diffuse milky way galaxy, while action was provided by occasional video streams showing previously-rendered computer animations in a TV-aspect ratio format projected to the opposite side of the dome from where we were sitting. After the automated show ended, the presenter followed up with a quick survey of the current night sky. He pointed out the red three-point line currently formed by the ruddy Betelgeuse, Mars and Antares, as well as Saturn that is also currently visible. By throwing (turning?) a switch he was able to expand the image of Saturn, pale rings suddenly emerging around the pale yellow-ish disc on the dome. At the end of the show my business companion commented that it was "a very analog experience".

I took a picture of the grand Zeiss projector, and managed to strike a conversation with the presenter, who was very knowledgeable (and who had in fact authored the previous show on the evolution of stars.) I asked him about the planetarium projector, which it turned out was made by the Carl Zeiss company of West Germany (as opposed to Zeiss Jena lab of the former East Germany which my researches had shown had constructed the planetarium projector that had been located in the McLaughlin planetarium). When I asked what the basic difference was, he replied that the Zeiss Jena ones were cheaper to buy than their West German equivalents. When I asked about how much of the existing projector is original, he responded that much of it was, and that they have a small machine shop for making replacement parts which are no longer easy to obtain. The slide projectors are no longer manufactured and as time goes it is getting harder to replace what wears out. When I asked him about the vintage depiction of the Milky Way that had appeared in the previous show, he remarked that it was an addition to the original projector that dated to the 1970s, and that the swirling image dated to the same era. He had some other interesting things to say, such as that the existing Planetarium was scheduled to be dismantled entirely (building and all) and replaced by a newer facility elsewhere in the city in three-year's time, and that he had recently received a notice about York University offering the original McLaughlin projector it had bought (and mothballed) for sale, presumably for parts. The kicker for me came when he mentioned that the planetarium and its projector both debuted on April 1, 1966 – the date and year I was born. When leaving, I looked at the electromechanical Zeiss projector, pausing for thought that it and I shared the same "birthday".

My business companion and I trudged the relatively short distance back to the hotel, and I said my goodbyes to him, since he was heading home early the following morning.

Before turning in I watched the conclusion of The Richard Dawkins documentary on religion and atheism, buoyed slightly by some of the conclusions (preliminary as they may be) on the subject as illuminated by science.