Proposal Title: Developing the Planetarium as a Center for Public Outreach, Content!! Production, and Student Involvement. Amount Req.

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1 Proposal Title: Developing the Planetarium as a Center for Public Outreach, Content!! Production, and Student Involvement Point Person: Department: Dr. Joshua Nollenberg Physics and Astronomy Amount Req.: $28,000 Proposal Summary: The SUNY Oneonta Planetarium has been experiencing a rapid rise in demand and usage. The demand is rising fastest among show requests for community organizations and visiting school groups. Meanwhile, more people are operating the planetarium than at any time in recent memory, and our faculty, staff, and students are increasingly producing our own content for distribution to other planetaria. This proposal addresses issues that will allow the planetarium to build on a variety of current activities in order to establish the Planetarium as a center for public outreach, content production, and student involvement by removing barriers to the production and dissemination of content produced by the students, staff, and faculty who operate the planetarium.

2 Proposal Narrative A. Proposal Objectives and Significance The SUNY Oneonta Planetarium has been experiencing a rapid increase in demand and activity (see Table 1 in Section C. for attendance numbers) since the 2015 upgrade to the Digistar 5 system and also since the hiring of the Director of Public Outreach, Doug Reilly, in This hire enabled an expansion in the number of showings, the ability to organize the Planetarium Operators Group (POG), greater focus on student involvement at the Planetarium, as well as a boost in programming, all of which increase student involvement in the sciences on campus, increase our (both campus and planetarium) visibility in the local community, and expand the development of new content at the planetarium. This has led to a natural increase in usage of the planetarium system, especially given that the number of regular users in POG has risen to 8, as well as an increase in natural wear and tear on the facility at a time when our maintenance contract with the planetarium producer, Evans & Sutherland, has expired. The planetarium did have a service contract which ran roughly from 2013, prior to the arrival of Dr. Joshua Nollenberg, through These contracts are necessary for a number of reasons. Not only do they pay for visits from Evans & Sutherland technicians to solve problems which arise with complex and technical equipment and software, but they also mean that Evans & Sutherland can aid in trouble-shooting technical glitches on the system from a distance, and they also give us access to the Evans and Sutherland Cloud, a repository of visualizations and demos that have been produced by planetaria around the world, including the SUNY Oneonta Planetarium. The visualizations produced by the SUNY Oneonta Planetarium include renderings of extrasolar planetary ring systems, binary pulsar models, dramatic views of the Saturn System, and may others which have been developed by faculty, students and staff working at the SUNY Oneonta Planetarium. Each of these visualizations is unique in that they have not been produced anywhere else, and they utilize the most recent data from scientific journals in order to produce very realistic simulations of the systems in question, however we can not share those demos with other institutions without access to the Cloud. Toward this end, I propose an additional three years of funding for a service contract with Evans & Sutherland, totaling $15,000. With the increasing demands on the facility, content production must also be scheduled around planetarium shows, and the time available for content production is becoming limited. Producing content on the main system also increases the risk that files will be inadvertently deleted or damaged as users experiment with new types of code for their visualizations. Using the full planetarium for development also generates extra wear on the projection equipment, since the projectors are likely to be turned on for long periods of time during development. Evans & Sutherland offers development workstations, however, which could satisfy these concerns. These workstations run the proprietary planetarium software that is found on the main system, but do so without the need for running the projection equipment and audio system on the full planetarium. The cost of

3 these workstations is approximately $12,000, but delivery is likely to cost several hundred dollars. The workstation would be housed in the Space and Astrophysics Lab in the Physical Science Building, which houses the Astronomy computers that were purchased with a StAR Proposal. The Astronomy computers have been used to generate some of the skins for objects in visualizations for the planetarium and they have also been used on a large number of widely-ranging research projects, most of which have involved students. The planetarium software, however, requires modified PCs with proprietary add-ons in order to work, yet the planetarium development workstation would nicely complement the other computers in the lab, and it would also increase communication between Astronomy research students and students who are working on the planetarium. B. Contribution to Strategic Plan 2015: Scholarship, Service, Strength This proposal directly supports Goals 1-3 from Strategic Plan 2015: Scholarship, Service, Strength and it indirectly supports Goal 4 from that plan as well. By placing a planetarium workstation in the Space and Astrophysics Lab, we will be able to have students working on planetarium programming work more closely with other students who are working on astrophysics research. This generates both a sense of community as well as a cross-collaborative environment in which students can more freely share ideas while reducing congestion and risk on the main planetarium system. As we have already seen in the creation of POG, getting students and faculty to meet regularly generates new activity based on freely-flowing ideas. One direct result of faculty-student collaboration in POG has led to a fertile collaboration with the Music Department. We have already piloted the production of audio tracks by students in the Music Department for use on existing planetarium scripts. We will be continuing this collaboration between Audio 3 students and ASTR 376 students during the Spring 2017 semester on a unique program which is funded with a Faculty Center Applied Problem-based Learning Grant using money obtained by Kjersti VanSlyke-Briggs and Joshua Nollenberg from the SUNY Investment Fund. This project will involve advanced Astronomy and Music students co-producing new planetarium visualizations with contextualized audio tracts. Not only does this craft a unique an distinctive identity for SUNY Oneonta while promoting creative learning outcomes intended for community service, but it also strengthens connections between otherwise unrelated disciplines while promoting outreach to the surrounding community. Another project, funded by the Faculty Center s Applied Learning Grant will involve Advanced Astronomy student constructing a new exhibit for the foyer in front of the Planetarium. This is work which will be done in concert with the A.J. Read Science Discovery Center to revitalize the space with the help of graphic arts students on campus.

4 The benefits of this proposal are that with the renewal of our service agreement with Evans & Sutherland, we could share these new planetarium visualizations with other planetaria around the world. This would mean that SUNY Oneonta Astronomy and Music students, as well as students from other disciplines, would be able to have their work shown in international venues. In the long term, this increases the stature of SUNY Oneonta by promoting public recognition of the unique cross-disciplinary activities which are taking place in STEM and the Arts on campus. This, in turn, will feed-back into and accelerate the current rapid growth of demand for planetarium programming by the local community, bringing K-12 students to SUNY Oneonta for what might be their first visit to a college. We who work at the planetarium would like to impress them. C. Supporting Data Table 1. Planetarium Attendance Year Total Shows Attendance * 1609* * As of 17 November, 2017 (roughly half of a year) D. Assessment 1. Continue to produce novel visualizations and continue to seek collaborations from across campus to feed into planetarium programming. 2. Once the service agreement with Evans & Sutherland is renewed, we will very quickly share existing content produced at SUNY Oneonta with the worldwide planetarium community and we will address current issues with the audio system. 3. We will continue to track attendance in order to track the growth in demand for planetarium programming. E. Implementation Strategy and Timeline July 2018: Renew the planetarium s service agreement and purchase a workstation. July-August 2018: Post existing content and audio tracks to the Evans & Sutherland Cloud so that they can be used by other institutions. Fall 2018 and beyond: Arrival and setup of the workstation in the Space and Astrophysics Lab. Also continue producing novel and high-quality visualizations and other works at the SUNY Oneonta planetarium.

5 Consultation The Chief Information Officer has reviewed this proposal and verified potential costs as it relates to technology: [X] No [ ] Not Applicable The Chief Facilities Planning and Safety Officer has reviewed this proposal and verified potential costs as it relates to facilities: [ ] No [X] Not Applicable The Budget Director has reviewed this proposal and verified potential costs: [X] No [ ] Not Applicable The Senior Executive Employee Services Officer has reviewed this proposal and verified potential costs as it relates to human resources: [ ] No [X] Not Applicable Other consultation (be specific): I have consulted with Dean Allen on needs for the Planetarium. There have been some discussions with the Chief Information Officer regarding needed repairs and the service contract for the planetarium, though not directly regarding this specific proposal.

6 Proposal Title: Point Person and contact information Name: Campus Phone: Campus Department/Unit: StAR Proposal -- Budget Template Joshua Nollenberg x2620 Physics and Astronomy Budget Detail please enter whole dollars 1-time Costs by year Number of Total 1-time Use of Funds Description Positions Costs Personnel Costs: $0 Temporary Salaries (Temp Service, Stipends, Extra Service, GA/TA) $0 Student Employment (Student Temp Service) $0 Other Than Personnel Costs (OTPS) and Campus Recharges: Materials & Supplies $0 Travel (not related to Professional Development) $0 Contractual Services $0 Student Scholarships $0 Professional Development $0 General Equipment $13,000 $13,000 Contracts related to Equipment Maintenance $5,000 $5,000 $5,000 $15,000 Campus Storehouse $0 Campus Telephone $0 Campus Mail $0 Campus Print Shop $0 Capital Costs -- renovation $0 Capital Costs -- new construction $0 Total Positions & Costs: 0.00 $18,000 $5,000 $5,000 $28,000 Other Funding Sources Intended to Reduce Total Costs Shown Above: New Funds (i.e. projected revenue generation) Projected Amount Available: Reallocation of funds from existing resources (include account number, funding source) Total Projected Other Funding Sources, Offsetting Total Costs: $0