Digital Night Sky Coming to the Rotunda

Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural vision for the Rotunda will come to life this November thanks to UVA English doctoral students Neal Curtis, Samuel Lemley, and Madeline Zehnder. Their DH work reflects Jefferson’s conviction that astronomy should be a vital part of UVA’s founding curriculum. He foresaw the Rotunda utilized, in part, as a planetarium with a sky blue interior adorned with gilded stars in the form of constellations. In his notes on the Rotunda's interior design, Jefferson writes, “The concave ceiling of the Rotunda is proposed to be painted sky-blue and spangled with gilt stars in their position and magnitude copied exactly.”

A scholarly symposium to take place November 1, 2019 from 2-8 pm will usher in the Rotunda Planetarium.

Thereafter, UVA students, faculty, staff, and will be able to view the night sky through an array of carefully calibrated digital projections in the Rotunda Dome Room. The Rotunda Planetarium  projections will be available to UVA affiliates for viewing on a nightly basis beginning at sunset from November 1, 2019, onward. Lemley notes that he and his collaborators plan to make the projections available for viewing by the general public twice monthly with further details about dates and times to come.

Rotunda Planetarium revives the conception of the University library as an instrument and location of interdisciplinary learning and discovery for the entire University community, according to Lemley. Jefferson had grand and largely impractical plans for what the Rotunda could be. Those plans ultimately gave way to the whims of the University’s first faculty who had the final say regarding the purpose and usages of the iconic UVA structure. But thanks to the Planetarium and its allied project Rotunda Library Online, Jefferson's outlines and sketches, part of a trove of documents written by him over the course of decades, will see new light. 

Also led by Neal Curtis, Samuel Lemley, and Madeline Zehnder, the Rotunda Library Online got off the ground thanks to funding from a Kenan grant. As of July 7, RLO (pronounced ar-low) comprised 2,996 short-title entries including 1,130 Rotunda Library titles that survive in UVA Special Collections.

Curtis and Zehnder presented the fruits of their labor at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) Conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, which ran from July 15-19. The Rotunda Planetarium masterminds also hope to produce a book based on the archive they have compiled through Rotunda Library Online.

According to Lemley, he and the Rotunda Planetarium co-founders performed much of if not all of the technical work that went into assembling the images that will ornament the Dome Room ceiling this fall. The first question confronting them at the outset of the project: “How do we take a 360° image, split it between five different projectors, and reassemble those pieces coherently onto the interior surface of a dome?” Undaunted, the Rotunda Planetarium trio plunged ahead. For RLO, Lemley learned the scripting language PHP and SQL, which allows for the manipulation and management of databases. Lemley says four months elapsed between the start of their image preparation and the successful final test of the projectors in June 2019.

In the midst of the University's bicentennial, Rotunda Planetarium represents a timely manifestation of Jefferson's architectural and curricular vision for the Rotunda and for the University of Virginia. Relatedly, Rotunda Planetarium made its star turn in the University’s official communications. In anticipation of the October 11-12 public unveiling of the University's upcoming capital campaign, "Honor the Future: the Campaign for the University of Virginia," University Communications released a stirring promotional video on September 27. The clip features Lemley at the 0:26 mark gazing up at constellations projected onto the interior of the Rotunda Dome Room. 

The introduction of the Planetarium project also presents an opportunity for the University community and the public to ponder the limits and failures of Jefferson's moral imagination as it relates to enslaved people. 

In a blog post on the Rotunda Planetarium website entitled “The First Test,”  Madeline Zehnder writes that she and her collaborators intend to wrestle with “the Rotunda’s legacy as a space in which these opportunities to learn so often depended on the exclusion and labor of others, including the enslaved people who constructed the Rotunda.” Additionally, Ms. Zehnder is working on a project on Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence with famed African-American farmer and astronomer Benjamin Banneker. Lemley hopes the Rotunda Planetarium projectors can also be used in conjunction with the opening of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers scheduled for April 2020.

Editors' Note: October 3, 2019

An earlier version of this article incorrectly indicated that the Rotunda Planetarium projections would be available twice monthly to UVA affiliates and the general public. The projections will be available to UVA affiliates for viewing on a nightly basis beginning at Sunset from November 1, 2019, onward. The general public will be able to view the projections twice monthly with dates and times to be determined.