everyday heroes

Master of the universe

by Ellie Spielberg

Jun 4, 2009 4:38 PM

Astronomy teacher creates Murrow planetarium to beam light on science education

He’s the Captain Kirk of public education, running a tight ship from the control console so kids in the school system can take a virtual trip through the solar system.

Over the past 30 years, Sam Storch has done everything from building a dome to buying a star projector from Tokyo to crawling around on the floor with a soldering gun looped over his neck by the cord like a necklace while running wires from here to there, all to create a thing of beauty: his life’s work, the Hubble Planetarium at Edward R. Murrow HS in Brooklyn.

Out of the 38 planetariums once gracing the city’s public schools in the 1960s at the dawn of the Space Age, this is the last operating sky theater left.

“Instead of naming it after Galileo or Newton, I wanted to name it after an American, someone more contemporary,” says Storch, an astronomy teacher with a comet’s tail of achievements following his name: elected fellow of the International Planetarium Society, an officer of the Middle Atlantic Planetarium Society, part-time college teacher and former Hayden Planetarium lecturer.

“So we named the planetarium after Edwin P. Hubble,” Storch continues, “even before the telescope was named after him. He’s the American astronomer whose research demonstrated the expansion of the universe.”

Contributing to the expansion of young brains, Storch has been teaching generations of students both from Murrow and from elsewhere in the city. Visitors from pre-K all the way up to college come to experience “live interactive programs, not just sitting back and watching the show.

“They are awed by this,” he says, and recalls when his own kids were little and “liked coming to school to ‘help daddy turn on the stars.’”

Behind him is the antennae farm, as he calls it — a stand of receivers for radio controls. Further behind is a beloved library, with some books dating back to the 19th century, covering the history of amateur astronomy in the New York area. Along the horizon are dozens of special-effects projectors set at crazy angles with wooden blocks and wedges. There is a method to this madness. Once a month Storch climbs up a ladder to reset them and replicate what the real sky is doing.

He can reproduce what the sky looked like on any date in history. His impeccable logbook records every time the planetarium was turned on and who was present. So if visitors return Storch can show them what they saw last week or 23 years ago.

No matter what century he’s in, Storch’s universe is alway a bit chilly and dry. Climate control is part of his arsenal in the ongoing intragalactic battle with a planetarium’s worst enemy: humidity and its evildoings to electronics.

Now he deftly flips switches on the console — and it’s nighttime at Murrow.

One is transported to a visually stunning divine world of the sun and planets, of constellations, meridians, rotating galaxies, binary stars, the ecliptic, the moon and the equator. And look — here comes a shooting star!

When a visitor says it’s like being in Vermont at midnight, the maestro of the cosmos flips other buttons and brings her back to a Brooklyn night. “It’s not air pollution, but light blight that dulls and block the stars in the city,” he says.

Light blight, however, has its upside. There are fewer stars to see and therefore less for beginners to learn. “We’re hoping that students will take what they learn outside with them, will realize they do have access to the sky even though they live in the city. It is a noble thing to show them that nature is there, waiting for them patiently.”

Indoors at the Hubble Planetarium, the skies are always clear.

“Three decades and about a quarter of a million students later, we at Murrow still maintain that you can see the stars from the city,” Storch says.

He points out that years ago when America’s cities were young, people of vision realized that their fellow urbanites would do well to have access to the natural world. It was then that botanic gardens, zoos, aquariums and other paradises on earth were created.

“But there’s only one invention of humanity that preserves the phenomenom of the sky, and that’s the planetarium. It’s there for our education at our convenience,” says the avid cosmopolitan.

And it’s an astronomy teacher’s dream.

“A planetarium is a way of immersing students in the three dimensional universe,” Storch says. “You can’t do that on paper or on a blackboard or with dots on a computer screen.”

In his logbook, Storch records every failure and repair, every blip, bleep and boo-boo. It’s in the stars, it seems, that life on earth — or certainly his life at Murrow — includes meticulously tending this glorious planetarium.

And, much like the universe itself, “It is never finished,” he says.