 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And my special guest today is Mark Breen who was involved with the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium. He's the senior meteorologist and planetarium director at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium located in beautiful St. Johnsbury, Vermont. And there's so many things to talk to Mark about. We last had Mark on Positively Vermont five years ago, and I'm sure a lot has happened since then. Welcome, Mark. Well, thanks Dennis. Glad to be here. I just want you to tell our viewers a little bit about yourself first. Sure. Yeah, I have been a meteorologist at the Fairbanks Museum for over 35 years now. I originally came up here to Vermont to go to school. Linden State College and now Northern Vermont University Linden had a great meteorology program. And so I came up here specifically to do that I wasn't anticipating that I was going to stay in Vermont. And then that opportunity came up at the museum. Essentially, the Eye on the Sky program that's on Vermont Public Radio started just as I was finishing school. So the timing was perfect. I just went from school right into doing that. And so that's basically, you know, I guess, I won't say it's necessarily the majority of my job but it's a primary part of it. While I was at the museum, I was asked to learn at least enough astronomy to do a public presentation in our planetarium. So, you know, for about six, seven weeks, I read books, I went up in our planetarium and I practiced and basically got hooked on it. And it just fascinated me in terms of one starting just to recognize the stars and so forth but then extending that into lots of other sort of areas of interest within astronomy. So, and shortly after that became the planetarium director, and I've been doing that for over 30 years as well. Tell us a little bit about the Fairbanks Museum, how it got started. I understand it was founded in 1889. Tell us a little bit about the history, the museum and the planetarium. Yeah, well, it's certainly unique to have such an amazing museum and the planetarium in the town that's relatively, you know, quite small. I mean, St. John'sbury, the population is only seven or eight thousand and I grew up in an even smaller town down in Connecticut and we had nothing like this. So, I think Vermont in general, there are a lot of our relatively small communities that have some amazing treasures and the museum's a great example of that comes out of the industrial age in the 18 hundreds. The Fairbanks family from St. John'sbury was quite influential really statewide a few of the Fairbanks became governors of Vermont. But in particular, they invented the platform scale. They became a very wealthy family and frankly Fairbanks the founder of the museum wanted to give back to the community. So, he had already been collecting stuff from all around the world he was just fortunate to be able to, to, you know, as a very wealthy person he traveled parts of the world. And he wanted to share that, that experience of being in other places, at least with the local people in St. John'sbury and so that's essentially how the museum came to be. The planetarium's a much later addition. A director at the time, Fred Mould, he was absolutely fascinated with the science in general. There are lots of stories that before I got there, he would lead classes he would have, you know, a snake or an owl or a crow right in the classroom with him, you know, giving lessons about that. But he was also interested in astronomy and so with the efforts of the talent so forth, created the planetarium was one of the first planetariums in the northeastern US and the only public one in Vermont, and so that was 1960. And so the planetarium is an amazing and also a fairly unique part of the institution. I understand it's the only public planetarium in the state. Yeah, it remains that there are a few portable planetariums now with some other organizations and we've added that to our sort of things that we do we have a portable planetarium as well. And of course, you know, I think a lot of people because of the presence of I am the sky are familiar with the meteorology and astronomy parts of the museum but a museum has a large natural history history collection birds and mammals from around the world. It's a very rare and even extinct species, along with a great collection of bits and pieces from around the world, and also some local history as well. Right. Well the website has a great deal of very good information and some photos about those other aspects. Yeah, but maybe could give us a little description of the planetarium itself in terms of the equipment and what it's capable of doing and various technical aspects of. Sure. Well, about this time, two years ago, we were in the process of tilting the dome. So equipment that went in in 1960 actually lasted for 50 years. The company spits planetarium company was actually amazed that it was still running 50 years later. But it really had kind of worn itself out in fact, we couldn't get parts for it anymore. So we changed in 2012, we changed to a new system which is a computerized system. And there's some pluses and minuses to it. I won't, you know, disguise the idea that I don't think the star field is quite as perfect as the other, but on the other hand, we can use this system to fly around the solar system. You can take an orbit around the earth or the moon, you can even fly out of the solar system so there are a number of capabilities that it has added to what we can do. It's a relatively small planetarium. It seats a maximum of 35 people. And we now have some flexible seating, which we didn't have before. And what that allows us to do is, you know, especially if we have a kid's group, maybe a Boy Scout group or a Girl Scout group or something. You know, they'll come in and we can just move the chairs out of the way and they can kind of relax on the floor and look up at the sky, just as though they were laying outside in the field. I will never forget my field trip in grammar school to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. That was such a such a thrill at the time, particularly with the space program getting launched, you know, right. Yeah, amazing to see all that stuff at the same time, the space was getting in the news every every hour during those days. And of course, you know, even present day, you know, there are a lot of different things that are going on with astronomy, different missions to different planets or comets in the sky, and we can much more easily with this new system be able to immediately present that information for folks so they, you know, get a one a sense of what what it is that they're looking at but we also have some terrific presenters that are able to, you know, translate that into, you know, basically, you know, just an everyday kind of person. What are they looking at and why is it important. That's great. Well I understand that there's some exciting things coming up in the museum itself is going to open reopen at the end of this month tell us about that. Yeah. So every year for the past several years we have closed in the month of January. It's a it's a month that you know we don't have obviously a lot of visitors from out of town that come through. So we take an advantage of that we close the museum it allows us to basically open up all the exhibit cases do some really significant cleaning, but it also has allowed us to refurbish and represent some of those collections that we have. So what we're doing again this year with the pandemic. Obviously, visitation would be low anyway so we've extended that into the month of February but the last weekend in February, we will reopen. We've redone in particular. There was a long exhibit case that had a lot of mostly birds in a few mammals from Vermont. It's been the same since I came here almost 40 years ago, and it was time to do something. And so that has that entire case and all of the different specimens in there have been redesigned reimagined so to say I mean it's still, there's still in a case there's no information about it, but you know you have much more information to go on. It certainly has been refurbished and updated. So it's one of the many things that we've been working on. And of course we're pretty excited because once we get into spring and the ground thaws, we're going to be adding to the museum also about that science. Yep. So this is something that we've been working on that kind of behind the scenes for the past couple of years. Any endeavor like this you know we're doing basically a major addition to the museum the first one since the museum was built. And in order to do that obviously it takes a lot of resources so we've been doing a lot of work like I said behind the scenes but at the end of this past fall, we were finally able to announce that starting either late April or early May, we're going to break ground and we're going to build what we know as the science annex. And the idea with it is to do a kind of a multitude of things, but primary purposes are to give us room so that we can do some hands on science exhibits, which is something the museum had many years ago. And then various things change over the years. We instituted some of that again but because there are a lot of programs at the museum with meteorology and astronomy. That's what we're going to focus in on. On the other hand, you know it's a large addition. And so there are other opportunities here including working with the Community College of Vermont, St. Johnsbury's particular branch of that. They've been kind of looking for a new home and a lot of their programming fits in with a lot of the programming that we do. And so they're going to be part of our new addition. And it also, and this is one of the things that we've always been trying to do, but in keeping with the museum we wanted to add handicap access to our second floor, but that's always been a challenge because of the structure of the museum. It is a historic building so we can't make a lot of whole scale changes to it. But this has allowed us to be able to do that. And we're taking advantage of some, well, very Vermont, very modern sort of techniques we're using something called mass timber construction. So it kind of promotes the Vermont forestry industry. And it also is a renewable resource so in terms of, you know, the addition resources that we're using it's a very green sort of addition as far as that goes. So we're trying to incorporate all of the things that the museum kind of stands for you that the museum is is there to help promote stewardship of the earth and that type of thing. So we're trying to incorporate that as part of the addition. Tell us about some of these cold and safe outdoor exhibits that will be going on. Right, so this is something that we obviously had to figure out last summer. The museum didn't close. But, well, for example, the planetarium that we've been talking about, and it does see 35 people, but it's in a very small enclosed space. And as a result, there was no way to be able to open that to the public during this past summer. So what we did is we actually created a space on our front porch, and put out some benches that were safely placed, and had a large screen and we did astronomy presentations they weren't necessary. I mean, it's not like a. No, there's no question about it. On the other hand, we were able to highlight different things that people could go outside and see on the upcoming evenings. We talked about the comet that was visible last summer. And all of those kind of things we still incorporated into our programming that was just simply outside. Another thing that we had that was outside as the butterfly house. And in that, what we do each spring, we bring in new plantings and we also have the various chrysalises and of the either moths or butterflies, and they hatch out and we get generally native species. So there are approximately five or six that we concentrate on. And what about mid summer or so when they've all hatched out, it's pretty cool to just walk in and you know the butterflies are all around you. They're landing on different plants and lots of information about that so we're going to be doing that again this summer. We have changed that slightly. We've made a somewhat more permanent addition to the backyard of the museum. It's a large greenhouse like building, but it's a very large building so again with with the socially distance, you know we can still do not only butterflies but we've been able to extend our seasons for education program. And this is kind of a three season room where during the spring and well into the fall we can do some outdoor programming where we'll do something just briefly as a classroom type of setting, and then we can walk immediately out of that museum's backyard, and we can do things well for example, I did an astronomy program, not too long ago, well back in the fall, but we were able to have the kids create the solar system. We had one student who was the sun and then we had, you know mercury and Mars, literally going around them but we could do that outside. And so those are the kinds of programs that we anticipate doing through the summer. And tell us about some of the things that are going to be going on in the universe that you're in tune with right now. Yeah, I think the one thing that I've been paying close attention to is the Mars, the next Mars rover, which is almost ready to land lands on February 18. In fact, I think it lands at five minutes before four o'clock which is pretty amazing to think, you know they launched it several months ago, and they've got it down to the minute in terms of when it's going to land. Those are the kind of calculations that go into a successful program and fortunately, we've been very successful in recent missions that have a lot of successful missions. And so this is the next in the generation of rovers that will be landing there. And so again, that'll be landing on February 18, and usually takes a few days for it to kind of test out all of its equipment, so forth gets settled in. So I anticipate some really cool pictures coming along as we get into months of March and April. I believe its mission length is six months, but very often the way that NASA designs things, for example, the Curiosity rover, that's still operating many years after its initial mission had finished up. How will you interact with that? Do you have any arrangements with other entities such as NASA to monitor this? How will you participate in the Mars landing? Well, one of the things that NASA has increasingly done a great job with is providing planetariums like ourselves with sort of up-to-date videos. So in other words, as they do some sort of exploration, I know one of the things that they concentrated on is finding evidence of water on Mars' surface or just underneath the surface. And so Mars has a sort of a science branch to it that's committed to education programs like ours, and so we will get various videos and even activities that we can get students to participate in just so they can better understand what's going on with the current mission. That's really interesting. There was a comment Leonard that you observed. Tell us about that comment. Right. That was just discovered last month, the month of January, just after the turn of the year is the first comment discovered in 2021. Each year there are very often between 20 and sometimes as many as 40 comments discovered, and about, let's say, 20, either 19 or 20 of them aren't visible to the naked eye. I mean, it is just, you know, most comments are quite small, quite faint. They're telescope objects, which is great for people that are studying them. But, you know, for you and I, you know, you want to go outside and see something. Well, of course, last summer, we had the fortune of seeing Comet Neil wise. That's just an acronym for a telescope that discovered it. But the idea was that all of a sudden we walked outside. I remember my daughter in law was visiting from Southern New Hampshire and, you know, we walked outside, walked down the street because this is visible right in the middle of town of St. John's Creek and all of a sudden there it was. So, with that in mind, Comet Leonard may be a, well, they call it a naked eye Comet. In other words, you don't need any special equipment. You should be able to walk outside and see with your eye. It may get that bright in December. So it's still a long ways away. Somebody sort of gave the idea that predicting comments is something like predicting tasks. They're just, you know, they are going to do whatever they're going to do. They're very independent that way. It could be bright. It could be dull and we won't really see much of anything at all. So there's a lot of uncertainty. One thing that I did find out about this comment, this comment. It's approximate orbit is somewhere around 800,000 years. So it's been a long time since it's came by the sun. And in this particular case, they don't think it's going to come back. And if they're wrong, who's going to know. But because it is, it's a comet that either has only gone by the sun perhaps once or maybe not, not anywhere close to the sun. Comets that are new, don't tend to be very predictable. And that we've, you know, basically, some folks will remember Comet Cahootek, way back in the 1970s. Comet Cahootek was supposed to be the comet of the century and everybody was so excited and it turned out to be kind of a dud. But what we found out was that it was a new visitor to the inner part of the solar system. Comets that are first time visitors, so to say, they don't always produce spectacular displays. Sometimes they do though so I guess we'll know in December. That's great. Well, one of the things I like to ask you about is the online astronomy programs that you have that people can tell us about those. Yeah, I think it takes a little exploring. I guess one thing that came to mind just the other day is that that old TV show. So you think you're smarter than a fifth grader. Well, this is pretty much the challenge because a lot of our programs, just because of the nature of the museum, you know, we focus in on school groups. And so a lot of our programs are focused on teaching kids, but I've had any number of adults who have either been in some of our kids programs or they picked up some kids books and so forth. And it's a great way to get introduced to something that you're not otherwise familiar with. So I say that as a way of exploring our various programs that we have, you can either get to them by going to the Fairbanks Museum website, which is simple Fairbanks Museum dot or G or you can go to our YouTube channel just, you know, just search for Fairbanks Museum and all kinds of programs will will appear. And one of the series of programs and I believe it's listed somewhere in the like sixth, seventh and eighth grade section. But this is definitely, you know, a great kind of series of programs, talking about the motions that you see in the solar system. We watch the moon, but the moon changes every night that you look at it, we watch the planets and they change over weeks and months, we watch the stars and they change over weeks and then seasons. And so it, you know, these programs are basically designed to give you an introduction to what you can go outside and observe in the sky. Also, a little bit about. I read a lot about how the pandemic has changed the light patterns or light pollution that's admitted by big cities and how has the pandemic changed the night sky the visibility of the night sky. Well, I don't know that it's changed it a great deal locally. Yeah, our population is lower. At the same time, though, I think it has changed people's well time structure, just in general. Many of us will be working at home or at home more often the kids are at home more often. And we're not going out and doing other things. And so I've had any number of people that have contacted me affect just the other day. I had done a program on astronomy through was the Norwich Public Library. And afterward, there were a couple of families that contacted me saying, we just took a telescope out of the basement, you know what have been collecting dust. And so they brought it out. And basically the question was, okay, what next. And so I think people are finding that whether it's a matter of finally having time to do something, or maybe just appreciating the fact that maybe all the other busy stuff that we did wasn't. As important or fulfilling or whatever. And so here's an opportunity, and it's a great family activity. It's also a great, you know, neighborhood type of thing is to get out there and start, you know, appreciating what's been there all the time, you know, taking a look at the sky, understanding different planets and so forth. I have a few friends that, you know, they're often asking me what I just saw this bright object, you know, it was, I was out walking my dog at four in the morning what was, what was I looking at. And so, you know, I certainly think the pandemic has re caused all of us to kind of reevaluate you, what do we find that's important what do we want to do that we've been putting off, you know that kind of thing. I bought a telescope myself, I just haven't had the time to calibrate it or get it. But I just, I love it because as a kid we used to do this we used to try to see flying saucers of course, or in the aircraft or whatever you know but certainly I've been reinvigorated in the concept, just walking out in the morning here it's just beautiful you can see the moon and the sun come up and it's just amazing environment that we have. Tell us a little bit about that environment by the by the museum. What's it like for stargazing by just the visitors or people who live there. Well, you know, we're really fortunate that so many places in Vermont, you know we have relatively dark skies, you know we have some small villages and you know very small cities, certainly. So if you're not in this place that has dark skies, you don't have to go very far to do that. And so that's certainly that is one of the key things in terms of seeing the sky is to really have, you know, a dark location now, having said that, you know, because I live right in St. So yes, there are street lights around, but in my backyard, as long as I don't trip the motion sensor light. It's dark enough in my backyard that if I look straight up I can see the Milky Way which is a relatively faint, you know feature in the sky. So I think, you know, finding, you know, maybe there's a spot that's not far from where you live that maybe that's an easy place to get to. I think I've always found that convenience is an important part of pursuing something like that. So in other words, if it's really difficult to find a place to look at the stars, you're just not going to do it very often but if it's relatively easy like I said, in my backyard it's in the middle of a small village, but I can see the sky. And so, if it's convenient, and you have the time and again with this pandemic, you know people have found that suddenly they do have some time. And I think that that's a plus right there but but we are fortunate that we don't have a lot of light pollution, and we really can see deep into the night sky. That's wonderful. Tell us a little bit about how the public can get involved organizations that can interact with you or support your efforts tell us about how the museum functions understand as a membership, and tell us about that membership and volunteers. Yeah. So, yeah, there are a lot of ways that you can kind of participate and what the museum is doing. Now, in terms of volunteers, we have a number of people that volunteer in different aspects of the museum. We have a large collection of items that they're not necessarily always on display, but it's a really important to preserve those items so that somebody that wants to, for example, do some research. You know, we have that, you know, those very, you know, unique and precious items, and they're, you know, preserved, hopefully, you know, as best as possible for years and years to come. And so, it might depend on your interest. You know, if you're interested, for example, in birds and mammals, there would be some opportunities that way. If you're interested in something like textiles and you have a wide range of collections and so a wide range of interests available for people. The other thing, of course, that you mentioned, you know, memberships, the museum really depends on having memberships because that allows us to do many of the things, you know, whether it's preserving and researching various things in our collection. But it also, you know, let's face it, the building has to stay warm in the winter. All of those things are really critical. And membership is a really great way to do that. And this is, you know, it's a two-way street. You get a membership. Obviously, you can come into the museum for free. You can come to the planetarium for free. But in addition to that, you also get various announcements about programs that are going on at the museum. And we have some special members programs. So if you are a member, you get invited to certain programs. And, boy, one of our favorite things to do, we have a couple of very social events. Obviously, we've had to curtail those during the past 12 months or so. But anticipating that maybe this fall we'll get back to a more normal sort of pattern that way. So when we do, and I know we will, then just imagine having a party in the museum. I mean, what a great place. I mean, you've got one, you'll invite your friends. So you've got, you know, friends and family that you're going to be enjoying this with. But it's a very social atmosphere, very different than it's not like some stuffy old science museum, you know, that kind of thing. So it's really those kinds of things are great fun. And so that's, again, just a benefit of being a member. And then finally, you know, we just mentioned that the museum is making a major expansion. We have raised about 90% of the funding for that. But we still have a little bit more to go. And so, if you're a person that really feels committed to making sure that, you know, science continues to be flourish that kids continue to learn about it that adults continue to learn about it. Then supporting the museum through, you know, some kind of donation toward our new expansion that would be a way to support the museum as well. That's a tax time is coming up so people might want to think about that. Well, there you go. That's right. Yes. Yeah. Excellent. Well, this is really been very exciting. I'm really thankful that you're able to meet with us today and explain what's going on and maybe when we get back to normal times, we can review some of the activities that have been taking place. At that time and we always love to have you it's been five years I can't believe it, but we have to get, we have to get you back a lot sooner than that. Yes, well, I, let's, let's make sure that it isn't another five years. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, thank you very much Mark. We're being our guest today and positively Vermont. This is Dennis McMahon, my guest today has been Mark green the senior meteorologist and planetarium director at the Fairbanks Museum and planetarium in St. John's very Vermont. Thanks for watching.