Series 8: Artworks, circa 1953-1993

This subseries consists of artwork produced by Planetarium staff artists to be photographed, reproduced as 35mm slides, and projected on the Planetarium dome. Most of the items in this subseries are acrylic paintings on Bainbridge board or similar stock. The subseries also includes a handful of ink drawings on cardstock and several plastic transparencies. The paintings vary significantly in size; the smallest examples are approximately 5 inches square and the largest are up to 50 inches long.

The paintings fall into three broad categories: single images, image sequences, and panoramic series. Standalone images contain a wide variety of subjects, primarily: stars, planets, galaxies, and other astronomical phenomena; depictions of famous astronomers or mythical figures; and spacecraft, telescopes, and other pieces of technology. About half of the paintings are grouped into series of 3 to 12 images (referred to as ‘skylines’) that were projected as panoramas around the base of the planetarium dome to give the illusion that the audience was viewing the night sky from different locations. Skylines include historical, modern, and extraterrestrial vistas. Other images are designed to be shown together as a sequence (for example, a sequence of six images depicting the formation of the Earth’s crust).

This subseries also includes a subject-based card catalog created as a system of organization sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. This card catalog does not describe the entirety of the series. However, many of the paintings (between a half and two thirds) are labeled with descriptive terms or with index numbers that correspond to the entries in the card catalog.