Planetarium’s Star Show Unveils Drama Beyond the Haze

With the sun vanishing in a soupy haze, a straggling crowd gathered high on a hilltop to gaze at the stars. But this being Los Angeles, the group--about 50 people--was going indoors. What nature could not show them, they would see on the domed ceiling of the Griffith Park planetarium.

“In Los Angeles on a clear night you may see three or four dozen stars, maybe 100 at the most,” said James Somers, 42, who spends two or three evenings a week here narrating the star show. He does this while operating a vast console of dials and switches, which set the heavens in motion on a five-story ceiling.

As he readied tape decks and computers for yet another performance, Somers took obvious pride in the facsimile universe he can offer. “The star projector,” he said, indicating a huge, ant-shaped device worth more than $2 million, “can show you 9,000 stars. It really drives home the point that there is a beautiful sky up there to see, if you can get away from the city.”

The crowd on this night was comparatively small for the 640-seat theater, yet the show’s theme--the dangers of a large asteroid striking Earth--was compelling, even dramatic. The catastrophic possibility is not nearly as remote as one might think. “Believe it or not,” Somers soon was telling his audience, “you are six times more likely to die from an asteroid impact than from an air crash.”

As the house lights dimmed and brilliant constellations filled the dome, Somers talked of the asteroid belt, a band of rocks in solar orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Switching to overhead slides and charts, the lecturer recounted the troubling history of wayward asteroids bombarding Earth.

One colossal orb six miles wide exploded into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago; it is thought to have helped wipe out the dinosaurs. A huge hunk of iron landed 50,000 years ago in what is now Arizona, blowing out a crater 600 feet deep and 4,000 feet across. In this century, at least two large asteroids have hit, including one in 1908 that is believed to have shattered in the air with the force of a hydrogen bomb, devastating 1,200 square miles of Siberian forest.

Despite the inherent human interest in such an apocalypse--and the wry gallows humor of Somers’ narration--the nightly (except Mondays) planetarium show is no longer the top entertainment draw at the observatory.

The star show’s popularity has been eclipsed by Laserium, a glitzier, “now” kind of presentation featuring rock music rhythms and a rainbow of laser lights swirling and dancing on the domed ceiling.

Begun in the early 1970s, Laserium is quintessentially L. A., an escapist, sensory voyage into the surreal. Laserium not only commands nearly twice the admission price of the star show--$6.50 to $3.50--but it sells out virtually every Friday and Saturday night, and draws sizable crowds during the week.

No one at the observatory seems to mind. After all, Van Nuys-based Laser Images, the company that operates Laserium, uses the dome during otherwise empty hours and shares ticket revenues with the nonprofit observatory. Planetarium program director John Mosley, who points out that the star show has drawn nearly 5 million spectators since it opened in 1935, attributes Laserium’s superior popularity to a different audience--mostly young people on dates.

“Fast food outsells fine restaurant food,” Mosley said. “What does that tell you?”

Somers, working his console in the dark, displayed a chilling home movie taken by a tourist in Wyoming 20 years ago: a rock the size of a bus blazing across the daytime sky. Had it hit, Somers said, the explosion would have rivaled the atomic blast at Hiroshima. Luckily, it only skipped off the atmosphere, like a stone off a pond, before flying back into space.

The dangers are real and taken seriously, Somers said. Astronomers worldwide are searching for asteroids in the Earth’s path; there are at least 100. Just one mile-wide rock, the kind that lands every few million years, could wipe out half the world’s population, Somers said.

As the show ended--with theories about how, or whether, missiles could blast such a hazard from harm’s way--the tiny crowd filed out. One man, Carlos Zavala, 22, stopped to ask Somers more about the logistics of a missile counterattack.

Then the doors were flung open again.

Outside, the line was in place for the late Laserium show, a throng filling the lobby and spilling out into the night.