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The Hatter Planetarium is located in Masters Hall, Room 115, on the Gettysburg College Campus. The following shows are free and all are welcome as seats remain. No admittance while a show is running.

We also accept field trip requests from school and community groups!

September

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Tuesday, September 12, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, September 17
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00  A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00  An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

October

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Tuesday, October 3, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, October 15
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00 A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00 An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

November

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Tuesday, November 7, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, November 12
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00 A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00 An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

December

 “Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, December 3
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00  A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00  An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Tuesday, December 5, at 12:00 Noon

Hello, friends of the planetarium. Here is our schedule of public shows for this semester.

Hatter Planetarium Public Show Schedule
Spring 2023

The Hatter Planetarium is located in Masters Hall, Room 115, on the Gettysburg College Campus. Shows are free and all are welcome as seats remain. No admittance while a show is running. As of now (January 2023) masks are optional on campus, but attendees are required to observe whatever protocols are in place at the time of their visit.

We also accept field trip requests from school and community groups!

February

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Thursday, February 2, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, February 5
            1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
            2:00  A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
            3:00  An external production (or two depending on runtime)
            4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

March

“The Sky this Month”
Thursday, March 2, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, March 19
            1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
            2:00 A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
            3:00 An external production (or two depending on runtime)
            4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

April

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Thursday, April 6, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, April 16
            1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
            2:00 A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
            3:00 An external production (or two depending on runtime)
            4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

A New Hatter Planetarium In-house Production, Title TBA, designed for grades K-2
Sunday, April 23, 1:00 & 3:00

www.gettysburg.edu/hatterplanetarium
Instagram: @gettysburgplanetarium
Contact: Ian Clarke, director, iclarke@gettysburg.edu

Here’s our schedule of free public shows for this semester!

The Hatter Planetarium is located in Masters Hall, Room 115, on the Gettysburg College Campus. Shows are free and all are welcome as seats remain. No admittance while a show is running. Most shows run about 45 minutes. As of now (August 2022) masks are optional on campus, but attendees are required to observe whatever protocols are in place at the time of their visit.

September

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Thursday, September 8, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, September 11
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00  A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00  An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

October

“The Sky this Month”
Thursday, October 6, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, October 16
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00 A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00 An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

November

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Thursday, November 3, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, November 13
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00 A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00 An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

December

“The Sky this Month” LIVE
Thursday, December 1, at 12:00 Noon

“Astro-Afternoon”
Sunday, December 4
                1:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE
                2:00  A Hatter Planetarium production from our collection
                3:00  An external production (or two depending on runtime)
                4:00 “The Sky this Month” LIVE

The last shows of the semester, but there are plenty to choose from!

Thursday, April 28, at 4:00 PM The Sky this Month

Remember the double rainbow on March 31? We’ll take a deep dive into what causes them. Also astronomy news and the current night sky, including a total eclipse of the moon coming up in May.

Saturday, April 30, starting at 1:00 Astro Afternoon 

(note: it’s Saturday this month due to exams starting Sunday)

1:00 The Sky this Month (description above)

2:00 The Hatter Planetarium Challenge

New show developed with student assistants. Audience participation encouraged. Try your hand at identifying constellations. Determine your location using the sun and stars. Prove that the sun is the center of the solar system.

3:00 Two Small Pieces of Glass: The Amazing Telescope

The film traces the history of the telescope from Galileo’s modifications to a child’s spyglass — using two small pieces of glass — to the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the future of astronomy.

4:00 The Sky this Month (description above)

Wednesday, May 4, at 12:00 Noon (reading day) The Hatter Planetarium Challenge

Bonus showing! Description above.

Hatter Planetarium Spring 2022 Schedule

February 24	4:00 PM	The Sky this Month
February 27	1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00	Astro-Afternoon
March 24	4:00 PM	The Sky this Month
March 27	1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00	Astro-Afternoon
April 28	4:00 PM	The Sky this Month
April 30	1:00, 2:00*, 3:00*, 4:00	Astro-Afternoon

*New original Hatter Planetarium show, details TBA.

The Hatter Planetarium is located in Masters Hall, Room 115, on the Gettysburg College Campus. Shows are free and all are welcome as seats remain. No admittance while a show is running. Per Gettysburg College policy properly worn masks are required for all visitors regardless of vaccination status.

Download this schedule as a PDF.

Typical ASTRO AFTERNOON Schedule

• 1:00 The Sky this Month LIVE
• 2:00 Recorded Show (e.g., “Oasis in Space”)
• 3:00 Recorded Show
• 4:00 The Sky this Month LIVE

Between shows we will play astronomy-related podcasts in the dome. Check our website for titles of the 2:00 and 3:00 shows as dates approach.

“The Sky this Month” is a timely live presentation on upcoming celestial events and astronomy news. Repeated presentations of this program in the same month will include minor updates for sky position on the current date but otherwise will be substantially the same. Breaking astronomy news will be held for the next month’s show.

The Hatter Planetarium is located in Masters Hall, Room 115, on the Gettysburg College Campus. Shows are free and all are welcome as seats remain. No admittance while a show is running.

The schedule is also available via the College’s events calendar and as a PDF.

Planetarium Nerds Talk about Dune

Panel discussion of Dune 2021 with Hatter Planetarium director Ian Clarke, astronomy professor Ryan Johnson, student assistant Garrett Adams, and former student assistant Fran Costa, ’19. Student assistant Meg Drew provides voiceover. Spoilers about all things Dune begin at 21:30 so be warned before you put your hand in the box! Music by zero-project.gr made available by the ESO planetarium media datbase.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Gettysburg Under the Stars from the Hatter Planetarium at Gettysburg College is a monthly (plus bonus episodes) podcast covering planetarium news, the almanac, a current sky tour, and astronomy news. It is hosted by Ian Clarke, Hatter Planetarium director. This episode includes information on the partial lunar eclipse that will be visible locally in the early morning hours of November 19.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Gettysburg Under the Stars from the Hatter Planetarium at Gettysburg College is a monthly (plus bonus episodes) podcast covering planetarium news, the almanac, a current sky tour, and astronomy news. It is hosted by Ian Clarke, Hatter Planetarium director.

This episode includes our first sky tour (starts at 4:20). Try it out under the stars yourself and let us know how we did. Student assistants Meg Drew and Garrett Adams join me with recent astronomy news stories. Music is composed by Natalie Dolan, ’23.

Look for our next regular podcast, including a tour of the November skies in about a month. We have also put together a panel to talk about the upcoming Dune movie. We’ll record that as soon as we’ve all seen it.

You can follow the Hatter Planetarium on Twitter and Instagram.

UPDATE: You can now subscribe through Apple podcasts and Google podcasts. You should be able to find on other major podcasts indexes soon, if it isn’t already there.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The video above announces our plans to offer virtual planetarium programming for the Fall 2020 semester. Back in March when the college moved to online teaching, we assumed that the resumption of in-person classes would mean we could also restart public planetarium shows. That idea proved a bit simplistic. On August 17, the college will resume in-person classes under some strict guidelines, but public programs in a space like the planetarium will have to wait.

Here’s what the Hatter Planetarium will be doing. First, we will continue to support the astronomy curriculum in person with reduced seating cpacity. Our public outreach, however, will be all online. Planetarium director Ian Clarke will be helped by returning student assistants, James, Meg, and Garrett. We plan to publish virtual shows twice a month; the video above showcases the technology we’ll use. We’ll increase our social media presence through this blog, twitter, and instagram. Feel free to tell us topics you’d like to hear about! We are also working on a free virtual field trip experience to offer to local schools and community groups, which a local teacher will help us test. We are not ready to open the field trip request form yet, but we’ll announce that as soon as we can. Finally, if time allows, we will work on developing new shows for the day when we can physically reopen to the public. When will that be? We hesitate to guess, but we will be excited to announce that as soon as we can.

Here’s what I wrote about Comet SWAN for the Gettysburg Times about a week ago:

Current models for Comet SWAN show that it will reach a peak brightness of magnitude 2.8 on May 21. That’s pretty close to the same brightness as the faintest two stars in the Big Dipper, but since a comet is a hazy, diffuse source instead of a starlike point, it will be harder to see. For another comparison, that’s about 30 times fainter than the great Comet Hale-Bopp of 1997. While it may be visible without optical aid, you will probably want binoculars to find it, at least at first.

Since then the bad news has come that the comet brightened much less than predicted. “Yet another fizzler,” says Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope. It’s currently an underwhelming magnitude 6, and since each magnitude is 2.5 times brighter than the last, that’s almost 19X fainter than the peak prediction of 2.8. Too bad.

But why are comets so unpredictable? Sometimes described as “dirty snowballs,” these icy objects are leftovers from the formation of the solar system. Many orbit the sun slowly far out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Some come into the inner solar system on one-time trips; others are gravitationally captured here in recurring orbits, such as Halley’s Comet. As these icy bodies approach the sun they warm up under the influence of solar wind and solar radiation and release gas and dust that may form a hazy coma and tail. That outgassing material is what we see when we spot a comet in the sky and also what makes their appearance so hard to predict. The brightness depends on volatile processes that take place as the comet warms up, and as we’ve seen with Comet ATLAS, that can even include disintegration.

The next comet to get our hopes up is Comet NEOWISE, which has the potential to reach naked-eye visibility in July. In the meantime, here’s a song named after a famous cometary dissapointment of the 1970s.