UA’s Flandrau Planetarium celebrates 50 years of science education

One of the best parts of University of Arizona senior Desi Neely’s job, she said, is seeing someone learn something new every day.

Neely works at the front desk at the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium, situated close to its introductory “Universe of Science,” exhibit. 

“I love seeing these school groups and seeing how the kids interact with science,” she said.

It’s rewarding, she added, to see how the girls’ faces light up with astonishment.

The museum and planetarium, named for author Grace Hodgson Flandrau, marks 50 years of science education on Saturday, Dec. 13. 

There’s free admission that day, Flandrau spokesperson Nick Letson said, plus an animated show for kids in its theatre and one of its regular “star talks” for everyone. An exhibit on the center’s history is also open through spring. 

“It’s our gift back to the community,” he said.

It opened in 1975 as the Grace H. Flandrau Planetarium, four years after the prolific writer died. Because she frequently visited Tucson for her health, her estate donated $800,000 to the university. 

“She was a real cool lady; kind of a renaissance woman,” Letson said.

Flandrau was a Minnesota-born author active in the 1920s–’40s, who wrote short stories, travel pieces, a weekly newspaper column and six books — three of which were turned into films. During the height of her career, she was praised by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton.

In the 1980s, the UA facility was renamed the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium, and the scope of the sciences it explored was expanded.

“We like to explore the universe from the depths of the ocean to the furthest regions of outer space,” he said. 

The Flandrau center opened at a pivotal time for space exploration and research. During the 1970s, the NASA’s Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to reach the solar system’s asteroid belt, Mariner 10 was the first probe to send back data from a long-orbit comet and capture a photo of Venus, and the Viking Lander took the first successful photos and soil samples from the surface of Mars.

OSIRIS-REx, a more recent NASA mission, was led by University of Arizona and was the first in history to take samples from a comet. It was launched in 2016 and returned to Earth in 2023. 

Over the past half-century, Letson said, the Flandrau Center has been there to educate the public on humanity’s progress through outer space.

“Flandrau just served as a way to connect the community with those efforts,” he said. 

Neil McSweeney has no idea when he first stepped into the Flandrau center that it’d be his workplace for about four decades. He first came to see a light show in about 1981. Then, about two years later, he became a volunteer before being hired as a student worker while pursuing a degree in electrical engineering. He was hired as a full-time employee in 1984 and spent years working with other theattrtechnicians. He also made and maintained equipment in a basement-level workshop, he said. 

“It was a small staff, so everyone did everything,” he said.

As the facilities manager, he said, he’s seen how advancements in technology have made it easier for students and visitors to map the planets and stars.

At the start, the “Hector Vector Star Projector,” an opto-mechanical machine, was used. In the 1990s, a video projector was added alongside it, which McSweeney said was rare for its time. In about 2014, Hector was replaced by two JVC high-resolution video projectors.

Over the years, Letson estimated, more than two million people have toured the center.

Just Friday morning, McSweeney said, about 300 field-tripping students had visited.

Science profoundly affects the way a person moves through the world, per McSweeney, from the way they vote to what they buy. That’s what’s kept him working at Flandrau all these years, even when other job opportunities have come up.

“What I enjoy about working here is being able to continue to educate children and adults in science literacy, so they can make good decisions about the world around us,” he said. “It’s basically making decisions based on evidence, which is what science is.”