Montreal Planetarium

Although I enjoy visiting museums by myself, the benefit of this project is that it arouses curiosity. Knowing what’s out there has encouraged people to join me on my journey. My friend Vanessa was eager to rediscover the Planetarium and as we are both also working on our French we decided to see the French version of the show “Telescope to the Stars.” I’ll admit that I wasn’t as engaged as I could have been. I was sick and things had been going wrong all morning. Because my attention span was diminished, I definitely felt more like an average visitor than a museologist. The problem there is that the average viewer might not try as hard to make an exhibit work for them and there wasn’t a whole lot at the Planetarium to reach out and grab my wandering attention.

The Planetarium is part of the Montreal Nature Museums, which includes the Biodome, the Botanical Gardens, and the Insectarium. The museum has a domed theater with timed shows and a permanent exhibition about the Planetarium and astronomy throughout the decades. The permanent exhibit is mostly didactic. This isn’t how I like my science. I don’t have a natural aptitude for, or inclination towards, sciency things. Ultimately I don’t want to read about why science works I want to see why science works. There are a few interactives, including two silver balls that you lift to demonstrate planets’ different weights, but overall the exhibit is text panel based. Complementing the text is the oddest collection I have ever seen in a science museum: champagne bottle, walking stick, Expo ’67 memorabilia. The exhibits could have done without the clutter. Vanessa and I did enjoy the vintage Planetarium posters, but I found it very strange that the Planetarium is a museum unto itself.

That said, the museum’s real appeal is Star Theatre’s giant hemisphere dome. The movie has an announcer who explains how the theater works and gives us an abstract of the show. We are going to learn about how Galileo is not the be all and end all of astronomical discoveries and about the discoveries of three Quebecers. Bizarre non? The first part appeals to me. I’m much more interested in the history of science and what scientists have done wrong than anything else. The second part made me laugh, as there are obviously other people who are important to astronomy besides Galileo and three Quebecers, but I do have to admire our province’s ability to promote itself at every possible opportunity. The show did touch on many other people and their contributions, but the real draw was seeing astronomy in action, so to speak, and to feel as though we were traveling to the stars.

I think that the Planetarium is a great destination for class trips. While we did learn things, and making astronomy simple is helpful in some instances, there isn’t much beyond the basics. In my opinion, the Planetarium has done a decent job with what it has, but I hope that with plans to create a new museum will come a new interpretive approach, one that moves the Planetarium away from a didactic exhibition space in favour of visitor participation and exploration.

4 down, 28 to go.