YONKERS
Even in the heavens, they’re feeling the budget crunch.
Venus is broken, there’s a gap in the Milky Way, and the moon is two and a half days ahead of schedule, but no one has the $3,500 it would take to get an engineer from Germany to come in and realign the stars. Mark Meretzky, a 53-year-old lecturer, regularly explains all of this with humor and some evident irritation when he gives his presentations at the Andrus Planetarium at the Hudson River Museum here.
“And this is where Venus would be if it wasn’t broken,” Mr. Meretzky says as he waves his laser pointer halfway up the dome and to the audience’s right during his presentation, “The Sky Tonight: Brilliant Winter Skies.” Venus’s light still shines; it’s just that the projector, which was installed in 1986, is pointing her in the wrong direction. “It’s humiliating, because Venus is the queen of the night,” Mr. Meretzky said after the show on Saturday. “It’ll be around for weeks — face southwest at 6 o’clock and it’s the brightest thing out there.”
Mr. Meretzky is a celebrity in these parts, a familiar face to the thousands of schoolchildren who traipse through the planetarium every year. Kids like him for his corny jokes about how Orion looks like SpongeBob SquarePants. Adults appreciate Mr. Meretzky for the strain of dark humor that permeates his presentation — he snipes about the popularity of big-budget planetarium video shows narrated by disembodied voices and riffs about his vintage equipment.
“Isn’t it ridiculous that there’s no off button?” he asked the audience on Saturday, as he waited for a slow, clunky device to clear an image from the dome.
Six months ago, the planetarium show at the Andrus might have been perceived as having a charming retro feel, with none of the glossy production values that so many New Yorkers have been accustomed to seeing at, say, the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. These days — an era when dial-up Internet access is seeing a revival, because it’s cheaper than a high-speed connection — low-tech suddenly feels of the moment.
PEOPLE say time is money, but those with too much time on their hands right now might wonder why anyone ever thought that was true. Progress — now that costs money, and when it comes to science, it sometimes produces money, too. “Do you want Harry Hairspray science or real science?” Mr. Meretzky demanded of the audience on Saturday. “Real science!” a boy cried out. Mr. Meretzky approved. “That’s good, because that’s what’s going to pull us out of this slump.”
Mr. Meretzky, an astronomy buff who teaches computer science at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, loves the effects-driven shows that are so popular at the Rose Center. But he said they don’t capitalize on the advantages of a planetarium dome — the way it can capture, he said, “spatial relations, like rotation, revolution, and points of view, angles you just can’t see on a video screen.”
Big-budget productions convey a sense of wonder and scale. He appreciates that, but he would like to see a little more elementary science thrown in. “Ask the audience afterward a simple question,” Mr. Meretzky said, “like, ‘Does the sun ever shine from the north in the Northern Hemisphere?’ That’s knowledge that they’re not going to pick up.” (The answer, for the star-struck reader, is yes.)
If there was ever a time to shift national priorities from entertainment to education, it might be now. But why should one preclude the other? Maybe some part of the stimulus package should be devoted to identifying more science teachers who have Mr. Meretzky’s gift for both. “He kept the audience entertained more than you thought possible in a planetarium,” said Isaiah Riesman-Tremonte, 12, from Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. “I definitely remembered what to look for that night in the sky.”
Mr. Meretzky, who now lives near N.Y.U., grew up in Yonkers, and he loves the way his job returns him to his childhood home, and to a childhood passion. He used to drag his parents to Trevor Mansion, still part of the Hudson River Museum, where he would listen to a sky show in a small planetarium that fit inside what is now the dining room. He is still amazed that he gets to be the person who dims the lights and turns on the projector that illuminates those awe-inspiring stars.
“I love operating that thing,” Mr. Meretzky said. “It adds a little texture that you sometimes push a button and nothing happens.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 20, 2009
The Big City column in some editions on Feb. 23, about
budget cutbacks at the Andrus Planetarium in Yonkers,
included erroneous information from a lecturer there about
the position of the sun in the Northern Hemisphere. In
latitudes above the