The Solar System - aka: Joh's slow descent into madness

Today, my colleague Amanda Kruger, put the finishing touches on our new presenter-led Planetarium show.

It’s taken us a long time. Turns out coding in a completely unique program designed specifically for planetariums is tricky to figure out. But we got there. Finally.

The two of us split the job in half. Amanda used her coding and Digistar wizardry to add sound effects, background music, a disembodied voice for our Planetarium and complex scripts to get us from one planet to another.

… and I basically spent an entire week being an idiot.

To be fair, the following posts didn’t start out that way. No I was all seriousness and professionalism with my research. I decided I was going to collate information from chosen reputable sources that our presenters could access and disseminate to our visitors.

But then… well you’ll see. The information’s still conveyed it’s just got a definite Joh-flair. Amanda and the other floor staff have started referring to it as “Joh-ims” and I’ve decided that’s entirely OK with me.

After-all, part of my job is to make science entertaining right?

Anyway, the resulting information document was originally supposed to be for internal use but I’m really proud of it. Since I wrote it, I thought I’d put it here on my little corner of the internet, starting with the Sun.

If you enjoy it and you’re in the area, you should come to Science Space and check out the show. Really, words just don’t do the visuals in the Planetarium justice.

Science Space is a not-for-profit organisation at the University of Wollongong. The work presented here was written by me as a part of a larger project spear-headed by my colleague Amanda Kruger.