John McCain uses Barack Obama's request for a $3-milllion planetarium projector as an example of wasteful extravagance.
So what would that $3 million have bought, had it actually been included in the federal budget?
Nothing less than a chance for a million children to explore our solar system.
Yesterday I called up Mark Webb, theaters manager of the Adler Planetarium, the would-be recipient of Obama's largesse. Webb said that the planetarium, which receives half a million visitors every year, is still using the same projector it purchased in 1970.
It's not a bad machine, but the technology has evolved. Top-end projectors, said Webb, now mix traditional mechanical projection with high-resolution digital capabilities.
"Traditional projectors show you what stars look like from Earth.
But when you add digital capabilities to the system, you can do anything you can do with a computer. You can see millions of objects that aren't visible to the naked eye. You can leave the surface of the
Earth, and fly out to them. You could have a picture of Jupiter, then fly in close-up and see spacecraft images of Jupiter in different wavelength. It exponentially expands the capabilities of the traditional planetarium projector," he said. "We're even hoping to be able to update data frequently, even daily. When you see a picture of the Earth on the dome, you'll see it with this morning's clouds mapped onto it."
Given the rapidly changing technology, it's unlikely that a new projector would last as long as the old one. Webb expects it to last from five to ten years. He also estimated that 40 percent of the museum's visitors are children, which puts the number of kids who would see the projector's show at one million. Many come from from light-polluted urban areas.
"Especially in major metropolitan areas like Chicago, children who grew up here barely even know that the sky is filled with stars. They can see, even on a clear night, maybe three or four dozen stars up there," he said.
So that's what Senator Barack Obama would have purchased with $3 million of what Senator John McCain called "pork barrel earmark projects."
"My friends," said McCain during the second presidential debate, "do we need to spend that kind of money?"
See Also:
Image: "Young Stars Sculpt Gas with Powerful Outflows in the Small Magellanic Cloud," as photographed by the Hubble Telescope.
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