SMC Planetarium Will Have Telescope Viewing, Talks, & More

SANTA MONICA, CA – The Santa Monica College John Drescher Planetarium will present feature shows in October highlighting the Apollo 7 mission, a guest lecture by Shelley Bonus, and a telescope session with a focus on the Moon and the Ring Nebula. The feature shows and the popular Night Sky Show will be held on Friday evenings.

The Night Sky Show will kick off the evenings at 7 p.m. with the events following at 8 p.m., offering the latest news in astronomy and space exploration, a family-friendly “tour” of the constellations, and the chance to ask astronomy-related questions, according to the press release.

The Santa Monica College October events are:

• October 5: 50-Year Retrospective – The Flights of Apollo
  • “Apollo 7: The Moon Ship Takes Flight, Grumpily” – In October 1968, Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele put the Apollo Command and Service Module through its paces on a 10-day test flight in Earth orbit. The mission was the first American flight of a 3-person spacecraft and featured the first widely-seen live television from space, but all was not sweetness and light between the crew and mission control during this flight. Relive this first manned Apollo mission with vintage images and video.
• October 12: Guest Lecture by Shelley Bonus – “Water and Ice! Comets, Asteroids, Dwarf Planets, and Cryovulcanism, Oh My!”
  • Bonus will cover the evolving understanding of the origin of water on Earth, and the plentiful water in both liquid and ice form in and on other solar system bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets (like Pluto), some of which have cryovolcanoes.
• October 19: 50-Year Retrospective – The Flights of Apollo
  • “Apollo 7: The Moon Ship Takes Flight, Grumpily” – In October 1968, Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele put the Apollo Command and Service Module through its paces on a 10-day test flight in Earth orbit. The mission was the first American flight of a 3-person spacecraft and featured the first widely-seen live television from space, but all was not sweetness and light between the crew and mission control during this flight. Relive this first manned Apollo mission with vintage images and video.
• October 26: Special Observing Event – “First Quarter Moon, the Ring Nebula, and a Pretty Double Star!”
  • A look through a variety of telescopes at a fat 11-day old gibbous Moon and its Copernicus crater and Mare Imbrium, as well as a look at the Ring Nebula and the pretty multicolored double star Albireo, the “head” of Cygnus the Swan. If clouds intervene, the program will stay in the planetarium with high-resolution images.

The John Drescher Planetarium features a Digistar projection system and is located near the elevators on the second floor of Drescher Hall, located at 1900 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. Tickets are available at the door and cost $11 for adults, $9 for seniors and children, for the evening’s scheduled “double bill," or $6 for adults and $5 for seniors age 60+ and children age 12 and under for a single show or telescope-viewing session.

For more information, call 310-434-3005 or go to www.smc.edu/eventsinfo or www.smc.edu/planetarium.

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