ABSTRACT
In 1994, after an early morning earthquake awakened Los Angeles and knocked out the electricity, authorities and the local astronomical observatory received numerous phone inquiries regarding strange lights in the sky (Lin II, 2011). These lights were hundreds of stars, and many Los Angeles residents were seeing them for the first time. The Milky Way-our galactic home and a celestial object that has inspired humans for millennia-was so unknown to these residents that its presence felt strange and foreign. How might we rebuild a relationship with an object that many humans no longer even recognize? In this chapter I examine how planetariums foster a relationship between humans and the cosmos-an object that can seem abstract because it is distant, vast, largely intangible, and seemingly insignificant to our daily lives.
