Want to count every star in the...

Want to count every star in the evening sky?

You can’t if you live in the South Bay with its sea of city lights.

“The lights blot things out and you can see only a few of the brightest stars,” says Jim Lund, manager of the El Camino College Planetarium in Torrance.

You can go to the desert, the mountains or Santa Catalina Island to marvel at the starry skies in their true brilliance--the “jewels on black velvet,” as Lund describes them. Or you can spend an hour at the planetarium, where “The Winter Skies” show begins tonight at 8. It will be repeated on three successive Fridays.

Audiences will “travel” through the skies as they appear this time of year. As real as the adventure appears, it’s an illusion created by a machine that projects the stars through 2,000 holes on a revolving globe. Lund controls it all from a console, narrating the show at the same time.

Lund says he tries to instill people with a sense of wonder, mingling astronomy, mythological tales of the constellations, music drawn from space movies, and even a few jokes. “Science doesn’t have to be dry,” he said. “It’s fun to know.”

According to Lund, in winter “the stars always seem crisper. It gets dark earlier . . . and people notice more stars.”

The major constellations of winter are Orion, the hunter; Taurus, the bull, and Gemini, the twins. The brightest star--some eight light years away--is Sirius, which also is known as the Dog Star because it is part of the constellation Canis Major, Orion’s big hunting dog. While some past planetarium shows have delved into such things as black holes, galaxies and the possibility of life on other planets, “The Winter Skies” is replete with Greek and Roman constellation myths.

“Orion is one of the most famous constellations,” Lund said. “There are three stars in the belt and you can’t miss them.”

There are several stories about how Orion got into the heavens, but Lund says he prefers the one about how Orion, a giant and a god, riled his fellows by constantly boasting about his powers.

“They had a scorpion like the ones you find on the Mojave Desert spring out of the earth and sting him on the leg,” Lund said. “The poison killed him, and after he was dead, the gods put both (Orion and the scorpion) in the sky, but in different places.”

If the weather is clear after the Friday shows, the audience goes up on the roof of the nearby Math-Engineering Building to look through the 16-inch diameter Celestron telescope in the college observatory. People will be able to see Jupiter and its four moons and the flame nebulae in the sword of Orion, which Lund said “looks like a ghostly patch of fog.”

The round, brick planetarium was built in 1969 as a classroom and to give star shows for schoolchildren. Evening shows for the general public started in 1973, and some 100,000 people--from third-graders to senior citizens--have been to the planetarium.

Robert Haag, El Camino’s dean of community relations, said the shows are so popular that they usually fill the planetarium’s 77 seats.

Bruce Fitzpatrick, an El Camino astronomy and geology teacher who helped design the planetarium, said the programs acquaint everyone with the “beauty of the skies. . . . That’s what the community college is all about, to meet the needs of the community.”

Lund has been putting on the shows from the start, and it’s a job he relishes. “I select the topics, do the scripts and choose the music. I’m a one-man show,” he said.

Audiences at the evening shows range from people to whom a star is just a star, to aerospace engineers and astronomy students who invite their families to share in their love of the stars.

Science fiction and the space program--the South Bay is a major aerospace center--have helped keep the El Camino planetarium shows popular. But Lund said people really seem to have a built-in fascination with the cosmos as a great mystery.

“Everybody wonders about all of this,” he said, looking up and gesturing with his arm. “Where does it come from and where is it going?”

Torrance resident Rita Spanbauer said she and her family became instant fans of the planetarium shows when they first went a year ago. “When the lights go out, you see the stars swirling above you, and it seems very realistic, as if you’re outside,” she said.

Her greatest enjoyment is seeing the constellations, she said, adding: “What I hate the most are the chairs. Your neck goes nuts after a while.”

What: “The Winter Skies.”

When: Today, 8 p.m.; also Jan. 12, 19 and 26.

Where: El Camino College Planetarium, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance.

Admission: $1.50, adults; $1, children 12 and under.

Information: 715-3406.