Join fellow Club member Douglas Duncan for a personal guided tour of the winter night sky at the Fiske Planetarium on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. Fiske opened in 1975 with a generous donation from Wallace Franz Fiske, Class of 1917. The 65-foot diameter dome is the largest planetarium between Chicago and Los Angeles and seats 206 guests. The 8K Sky-Skan projection system, cutting-edge content, dazzling visuals, and fantastic sound system are unparalleled. Plus, the Fiske has a MegaStar projector that shows 10 million stars and the Milky Way, creating one of the most beautiful indoor skies you’ll ever see.
Dr. Douglas Duncan is an astronomer at the University of Colorado. From 2002-2018 he directed Fiske Planetarium, leading it to be the most advanced planetarium in the U.S. Duncan earned degrees at Caltech and the University of California Santa Cruz. He was part of the project that first found sunspot cycles on other stars. Subsequently, he joined the staff of the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1992, he accepted a joint appointment at the University of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium, beginning a trend of modernization of planetariums that has spread to New York, Denver, Los Angeles, and now Boulder. In 2011, he received the prestigious Richard Emmons award presented to the “Outstanding University Astronomy Teacher in the US.”
Dr. Duncan leads educational trips throughout the world to watch total eclipses of the sun and to see the northern lights. In 2017, for the best U.S. total eclipse in 40 years, he helped arrange for 7,000 libraries to receive 2.1 million pairs of safe eclipse-watching glasses. Ask him about his plans for the 2023 and 2024 eclipses.