Neal Curtis, Samuel Lemley and Madeline Zehnder conducted some keen literary sleuthing to discover Thomas Jefferson’s original intentions for the Dome Room, and then harnessed modern digital technology to bring the planetarium to life in a way that the University’s founder could not have imagined.
“The concave ceiling of the Rotunda,” Jefferson wrote in 1819, “is proposed to be painted sky-blue and spangled with gilt stars in their position and magnitude copied exactly.”
The above quote comes from a small notebook that Jefferson used in the early stages of imagining the University, where he sketched some designs and took notes about materials, Lemley said. In a blog post, Lemley wrote that Jefferson intended for the stars to be repositioned every day, using “a mystifying (and dangerous) boom-and-pulley lift that would elevate an operator to adjust stars pinned to the Rotunda’s concave ceiling.”