Every fall, the dome above Bowling Green gets a little haunted. On Thursday, Oct. 29, the Bowling Green State University Planetarium presents "Spooky Space: Cosmic Connections to Halloween," an hour-long program that takes the season's monsters and finds their astronomical counterparts overhead. The show runs from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Physical Sciences Laboratory Building on Ridge Street, and public stargazing follows evening shows, weather permitting.
The premise is simple and, once you see it, hard to unsee. Space is full of things that look like Halloween characters, if you know where to look and are willing to let your brain do what it does naturally. There are ghostly nebulae, vast clouds of hydrogen and dust that seem to wear faces. There are black holes, the ultimate sucking monsters, so dense that nothing escapes once it crosses the event horizon, not even light. There are zombie stars and a "pumpkin sun," the solar corona photographed by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, its bright magnetic features arranged into something that looks uncannily like a jack-o'-lantern. The Witch Head Nebula, a supernova remnant in the constellation Eridanus illuminated by the supergiant star Rigel in Orion, is roughly 1,000 light-years away and, at the right angle, unmistakably a witch.
What makes those images work is a phenomenon called pareidolia, the human habit of conjuring familiar faces and figures out of random patterns. It is the same trick that lets you see animals in clouds. The planetarium's own materials lean into it: the Ghost Nebula, about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus and more than two light-years wide, is described as containing a couple of ghosts dancing for joy, if you look closely enough. The show is built to explain the science behind the spookiness rather than just parade the pictures, which is the difference between a Halloween slideshow and an astronomy lesson wearing a costume.
"Spooky Space" is not unique to Bowling Green. Versions of the program have circulated among North American planetariums for years, and the title and framing, including the "cosmic connections to Halloween" subtitle and the argument that Halloween is itself an astronomical holiday, appear in shows from the University of Maine's Maynard Jordan Planetarium to the Milwaukee Public Museum, whose planetarium premiered its own "Spooky Space" in October 2018. The University of Toledo's Ritter Planetarium has screened it in recent Octobers, recommending it for viewers ages 6 and older. The show's durability makes sense: the celestial objects are real, the pictures are genuinely strange, and the holiday hook gives a science theater a reason to fill seats on a weeknight in late October.
At Bowling Green, the setting matters as much as the subject. The planetarium is a public science theater under a 40-foot dome, seating 114 people, operated by the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It opened in 1984 and was extensively renovated in 2013 and 2014, when a SciDome video system was installed that can project the sky as it would appear from any point on Earth at any moment in time. During the day it serves as a classroom for BGSU astronomy courses; on selected evenings it opens to the public of northwest Ohio.
The public schedule runs from September through early May, with shows most Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Sundays at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. Each program typically begins with a live star talk pointing out the current evening sky, then gives way to the multimedia show, and often ends with questions. Admission is a suggested $2 donation, which may be the best entertainment value in Wood County. One practical warning: doors close five minutes after the published showtime, so arriving at 6:35 means missing the whole thing.
If the clouds hold off, the evening continues upstairs. The observatory sits on the roof of the Physical Sciences Laboratory Building and houses a computer-operated DFM reflecting telescope with a half-meter, 20-inch primary mirror, fitted with a sensitive CCD camera for measuring the brightness and color of stars. The observatory also keeps a sky deck and several portable telescopes that come out alongside the big one during public stargazing. Students and faculty on the planetarium and observatory staff run those sessions, and introductory astronomy students use the same equipment in their coursework, so the people pointing out Saturn or a globular cluster on a Thursday night are often undergraduates who have been trained on it.
Late October is a decent moment for it. The show lands two days before Halloween, with the constellation Pegasus and the Andromeda Galaxy well placed in the evening sky and the Pleiades climbing in the east, though what is actually visible depends on the weather and on what the staff choose to aim at. The planetarium advises calling 419-372-8831 beginning an hour before a scheduled stargaze for a recorded message on whether it will be held or canceled, a useful number to have if the forecast looks doubtful.
There is something fitting about a university planetarium using Halloween as a teaching tool. The holiday's roots are tangled up with the turning of the year and the shortening of days, and the show's framing, that Halloween is an astronomical holiday, is not just a marketing line. The same sky that produced harvest festivals and harvest moons produced the stories people told about the dark. For an hour on a Thursday night, the dome makes those stories literal: the ghosts are hydrogen, the vampires are gravity, and the faces are your own brain doing what it evolved to do. Tickets are a donation, the doors are open to anyone, and the telescope is upstairs if the sky is clear.