Poking her head out into the hallway of King High School, Laura Peck waved a crowd of spectators into a lobby decorated with telescopes and space posters leading to a windowless room with a tall dome ceiling.
Just before 6 p.m. Tuesday, the spectators filled reclined green seats centered around an imposing device covered in projector lenses, keeping their eyes on the ceiling above. They’d come to see the stars in the school’s planetarium during the second show of the school year.
For much of the past two years, the Robert Wollman Planetarium has stood empty, with public viewings canceled. This month, it relaunched a full schedule of weekly public shows.
Peck, the planetarium director, flicked on two videos formatted for projection on curved ceilings. The videos focused on the vastness of the universe and explored the Milky Way and other galaxies visible from Earth, allowing the audience’s eyes to adjust to the dim room.
Then, Peck showed the audience a light-pollution-filled sky — the exact sky a Corpus Christi resident can expect to see during early evening in mid-September.
The stars, tiny pinpricks of faint light, were barely visible. Next, the dome was engulfed in darkness, an example of what a person might see in an alternate reality with no light seeping out of homes and businesses and no street lights, with bright stars filling every arch of the ceiling.
“The best way to view the stars is to leave the city behind,” Peck said. “Or we can pretend that Corpus Christi is having a power outage.”
The sight prompted “wows” even though about half of the audience indicated at the beginning of the show that this wasn’t their first visit to the planetarium.
Attendee AJ Trevino said he came Tuesday because he enjoyed the planetarium show as a child.
“I’ve always enjoyed space and the stars,” Trevino said.
Since 1965, generations of area children have filed into the planetarium for field trips. As adults, they can visit again during the weekly public shows.
“We’re a product of the space race,” Peck said. “In the 1960s, the school district received a federal grant to actually help build this to encourage high school students and the public about space exploration.”
Peck has been the planetarium director since 2011, after the previous director for whom the planetarium is now named, Robert Wollman, retired.
Within Corpus Christi ISD, astronomy students, other science classes and occasionally a foreign language class visit the planetarium throughout the year.
Other school districts and private schools, as well as home school groups and community organizations, also visit. The Corpus Christi Astronomical Society recently began using the planetarium as a meeting spot.
From Labor Day until just before Memorial Day, the planetarium holds public viewings at 6 p.m. on Tuesdays when school is in session.
Renee Cantu said she’d heard of the planetarium years prior, but its closure during the pandemic prevented her from visiting. She attended the show for the first time Tuesday with members of her family who enjoy learning about space.
“This is the closest we get to the real thing,” Renee Cantu said.
Learning about the galaxies and the position of Earth’s solar system in the universe was humbling, Elisia Cantu said.
“People, we think we’re on top of everything, but no, we’re not,” Elisia Cantu said. “We’re not the center.”
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