Bradenton’s Bishop Planetarium celebrates 50 years

One night, everything in the whole place melted.

It was in the middle of the night, in August, 2001. An electrical fire started in the walls of the Bishop Planetarium in Bradenton’s South Florida Museum. It wasn’t a roaring blaze. In fact, when firefighters entered the planetarium, they had trouble even locating the fire. But they could feel the heat and see the damage it had caused.

“The dome itself — it’s a poured concrete dome — acted like a kiln,” Jeff Rodgers said. “It melted everything.”

It could have easily been the end of one of Bradenton’s most distinctive destinations, and one of it most recognizable landmarks. But a few years later, the Bishop Planetarium re-opened, with a digital system that made it one of the most high-tech planetariums in the country.

“It’s a true phoenix story,” Rodgers said.

Thanks to that re-birth, the Bishop Planetarium is able to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year.

Rodgers, who had been the museum’s director of education, had previously worked at the Hayden Planetarium. After the planetarium re-opened he was tapped to become the director of the Bishop Planetarium, a post he has held ever since. But in his early days on the job, learning how to drive a digital planetarium required some on-the-job self-training.

“I knew planetariums,” he said, “but the digital system, that was new to everybody.”

The planetarium opened in 1966, at the height of the space race. E.E. Bishop, a museum board member, was an astronomy buff, and he wanted Bradenton to have the kind of planetarium that you’d usually find only in major cities.

Although there are other planetariums in the area, including one in Tampa and one in St. Petersburg, the Bishop Planetarium has a larger dome.

In the days before the fire, some of the most popular events in the planetarium had little to do with the stars. Late-night laser light shows, set to music by Pink Floyd or other rock bands, drew young people from all over the Tampa Bay area.

The state-of-the art digital system that was installed after the fire, and the even more high-tech system that was installed three years ago, kept Bradenton’s planetarium among the most advanced in the world.

Going digital

In the early days, planetarium displays were little more than points of lights projected on a dome. The current digital system at the Bishop Planetarium is loaded with three-dimensional maps of the entire known universe. Rodgers and his audiences on a virtual trip to distant galaxies and look back at earth.

“We can land on the surface of Mars if we want to.” he said.

The Bishop Planetarium still attracts a lot of people whose interests are non-astronomical.

For nine years, students and faculty members at Sarasota’s Ringling College of Art and Design have worked with the planetarium to create animated “full dome” artworks. They’re animated pieces designed specifically to be screened on domes. The animation are comparable to the top half of virtual-reality works, but they don’t require glasses. Full dome art has a full-semester course at Ringling aimed at teaching students how to create art for a planetarium dome.

They show the resulting works in a festival called Cosmix every April. The works by the students and faculty are entered into full-dome festivals all over the world, and regularly win prizes for works they originally show at the Bishop Planetarium.

Claudia Cumbie-Jones, who heads the Ringling program with her husband Lance Ford Jones, credits the Bishop Planetarium for helping the students achieve full-dome artistic excellence.

“We’re really lucky to have access to the Bishop Planetarium,” she said. “It probably ranks as one of the best planetariums in the country now.”

But science is still the Bishop Planetarium’s primary mission. In recent years, pictures from the Hubble telescope and even developments in particle physics at CERN have driven planetarium audiences to ask questions about a broader range of scientific topics, and the digital system allows Rodgers to answer them with spectacular three-dimensional imagery.

Late in the year, Rodgers said, the planetarium will probably have some special events and promotion to celebrate its 50 years. But he’s not ready to announce them yet.

“I have some things in mind,” he said. “But if I talk about them and they don’t happen I’ll be run out of town on a rail. I do not want to be run out of town on a rail.”

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 5:24 PM with the headline "Bradenton’s Bishop Planetarium celebrates 50 years."