(soft melodic music) - "Ah, Moon-and Star, You are very far, But were no one, Farther than you."

The stars have inspired us since the dawn of time.

Emily Dickinson wrote about the night sky in her poem, as many others have done in literature and in folk tales to reflect on life on Earth.

The patterns of the planets and stars have been used for thousands of years as a way for societies to predict weather and seasonal changes.

- Say, "Wake up, star projector."

- Wake up, star projector.

- We can make it orange.

We can put music on.

- Hi, I'm Chrisena, and today, you and I, we're going into outer space!

Sort of.

(chuckles) At the Whitworth Ferguson Planetarium.

Come on, let's go!

♪ Let's go, let's go ♪ ♪ Let's go, let's go ♪ ♪ Let's go ♪ ♪ Let's go (giggles) ♪ The Whitworth Ferguson Planetarium provides an immersive environment where up to 48 visitors at a time can sit under its 35-foot diameter dome and view the stars and much more.

Hi, Dr. Williams.

- Hi.

How are you today?

- So good.

So nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you too.

Welcome to Buffalo State University.

We're standing in the science and math complex, and so we have lots of laboratories and classrooms, but I'm really excited to show you today the Whitworth Ferguson Planetarium.

(intriguing music) - Wow.

This thing's huge.

Now, Dr. Williams, it does look a little crooked.

- You're right.

It is tilted about the same angle that Earth's axis is tilted.

(bright music) This is one of our old star projectors.

So here at Buffalo State, we've had a planetarium since 1964, and this is the star projector that was in the old planetarium.

- Now what's the difference between an observatory and a planetarium?

- Well, in an observatory, you'd be looking through telescopes to look at the night sky.

In a planetarium, we recreate the night sky.

- Interesting.

(bright music continues) - This is our planetarium.

- [Chrisena] Wow.

- So this is where we control all of the different systems we have in the planetarium.

So we can change the color, we can make it orange, we can put music on, we turn down the lights all the way, and we start to use our computers to show the sky.

So we're going to start with our digital planetarium.

So as Saturn, we see its beautiful rings surrounding the planet.

Now the planets orbit the sun, and the sun is our star, but there are lots and lots of stars in our galaxy.

So now what I can show you is what our galaxy would look like if we could fly really, really, really far away in a spaceship and look back.

Notice how it spins around and has that shape, kind of like a pancake?

That's our galaxy.

But out in the universe, there are lots and lots of galaxies, so now I can show you what it would look like if we fly through tons of those galaxies.

- [Chrisena] Wow.

So all of these are galaxies.

- [Dr. Williams] Actually, all of them are groups of galaxies.

So in astronomy, we learn new things every day, and one of those things is how many galaxies are out there in the universe.

And so when we look at the night sky, we see stars, and sometimes we can see shapes in those stars.

- Constellations.

Right?

- Exactly.

A lot of the shapes are constellations where we need to use our imaginations to connect the stars together and see shapes.

So I'm going to show you a constellation named Orion.

In front of us there, see those three stars that line up?

That would be the Belt of Orion.

So we want to use our imaginations to see the shape of a person up there and I'm going to help us by connecting the stars together with some lines.

So you see those three stars with his belt, and then he has two stars above there being his shoulders.

Does that help your imagination a little bit?

- I definitely see him.

What's the story behind Orion?

- One of them has Orion being a fighter, a warrior.

So let's use our imaginations to see the shape of Orion maybe holding a sword and maybe a shield to protect himself.

Another story has him fighting with Taurus, the bull, because right there next to Orion is Taurus the bull.

But then, other stories have Orion being a hunter.

He has a big dog and a little dog over by him helping him hunt.

And in some of the stories they're hunting a rabbit.

So there's also a rabbit there.

- Wow.

Would they use the stories for anything other than entertainment's sake?

- People wanted to make sense of what they saw up in the skies, and they would notice that the patterns change over the course of the year and that helped them keep track of time as a calendar.

It would help them understand when to plant their crops, when it might rain, and it also was important to understand when they would see the same constellations, the same stars again.

So Orion, he's kind of our winter friend.

We see Orion best in the wintertime.

We see him in the fall and in the spring and we don't see him in the summertime.

But Orion's just one of many, many different constellations that are up in the sky.

So different people around the world had their own stories, had their own shapes, but about a hundred years ago, astronomers had to get together and come up with one set of constellations.

And so today, we have 88 different constellations and if I put them all on at the same time, we see that some of them are animals, some of them are people, some of them are made up creatures, and they all have stories about them.

There's a big sea creature over there.

There's even a lion.

Leo the lion over there.

But now what I'd like to do is actually switch over to one of our other projectors, our star projector.

We said that this is the hundredth anniversary of the planetarium.

Before that, people would paint pictures on ceilings of where the stars are.

They would even build big wooden balls and put holes in them to show where the stars would be.

And things are going to get very dark in here.

And once it's dark, we'll actually wake up our star projector.

So to do that, I'm just going to switch positions with you a little bit.

So say, "wake up star projector."

- Wake up, star projector.

(intense music) (Chrisena clapping) That was awesome.

(laughs) I love that.

- And now that we have the darkness of space, we have the brilliant stars showing up.

And one of the other shapes that we hear about a lot is the Big Dipper.

Now the Big Dipper's in the northern part of the sky, and right now we're looking to the south.

We could look behind us, but it's more fun to turn the sky around.

Now, a lot of times people say the Big Dipper is a constellation, but it's actually not a constellation because it's part of a bigger constellation that we call Ursa Major, the Big Bear.

Sometimes it's hard to see all the stars in the Big Bear, but those seven stars that make up the Big Dipper are bright enough that even in a place like Buffalo or a big city that has a lot of lights, we can see those seven stars making up the Big Dipper.

So can you find it up in the sky?

- [Chrisena] Is that it right there?

- Exactly.

So there's the Big Dipper.

- I see it.

- So this is really important for us here in the planetarium, to be able to show the sky at night without any lights around.

So think about what the sky looks like where you live, how many lights you have around your house, maybe there are lights along the street.

A lot of that light goes up into the sky and it makes it hard to see the stars.

But if we could go back in time before we had all those lights, this is what we would see up in the night sky every night when it wasn't cloudy.

(pensive piano music) - [Chrisena] I feel really small right now.

- It makes us feel small, but I think another fun way to think about it is that it's amazing that with really good computers and really good telescopes, we can learn so much about what's out there in space.

And so, yeah, we're small in the universe, but we're big in terms of what we can learn about.

So the stars are pretty amazing, aren't they?

- [Chrisena] They are.

- Well, there's one more thing I want to show you here in the planetarium.

We have a laser system.

Have you ever been to a laser music show?

- I haven't.

- I'd like to show you that now.

- Please.

(cheerful music) Wow!

The planetarium really helps us to understand just how connected we all are to the universe.

And they're pretty fun to visit too.

You should see if there's one near you.

How often do you observe the stars and the night sky?

Thank you so much for joining me.

I can't wait for the stars to come out tonight so I can write some of my own stories.

But for right now, I got to go.

I'll see you next time.

(soft melodic music)