If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’ve enjoyed a museum exhibit or two in your life. But do you ever think about what goes into creating them? How do they design engaging and educational activities and programs for people of all ages and interests? And what’s involved in making those amazing planetarium movies? In this episode, we talk with a scientist from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science about his work with the museum’s space science program, about creating visuals for planetariums, and how humans learn outside of a traditional classroom setting.

Dr. Ka Chun Yu joined DMNS as part of a team tasked with creating planetarium software to visualize the known universe. He has produced movies and live presentations including Earth systems programs for the digital dome and continued to create new planetarium visualizations and other educational content. He has conducted educational research to study the use of digital planetariums for astronomy education. Ka Chun’s astronomical research is in observational star formation, looking at outflows from protostars and studying the properties of young stellar clusters. He has been involved in observing programs with the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as ground-based optical, infrared, and radio observatories around the world.