On one of the coldest days of the winter, workers are wiring lights in a small building behind Pike’s Waterfront Lodge along the Chena River.
“Guests always ask the hotel, ‘Will I be able to see the aurora from there?”
Pike’s general manager Liz Griswold says the hotel’s new Aurora Discovery Institute will provide visitors an aurora experience even if they don’t see the real thing.
In the middle of the room is a 7-foot diameter rotating globe created by Seattle based artist Eric James Morris. Morris, who’s built globes for the Olympic Games and the United Nations, is checking projectors that shine colored lights at the top and bottom of the model earth.
“I don't know that anyone's ever built a world globe that depicts the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. So, I thought, oh, what a wonderful opportunity to create something brand new and to highlight this spectacular natural phenomenon,” Morris said.
The little building housing the globe was initially supposed to be a warming hut for the hotel’s sledding hill, but hotel owner Jay Ramras saw another opportunity to entertain guests who often ask about the aurora.
“And I typically low-common-denominate down to, ‘Well, if it is clear and it's cold and it's after 10:00 PM there's a chance you might see it. And if you see it, wake me up. And if it's not too cold, I'll go outside and look at it with you,’” Ramras said.
Looking to provide a more scientific explanation, Ramras says he came across Morris’ website: earthball.com. and hatched the idea for an onsite 3-d aurora display.
“And so, we wanted a building, our Aurora Discovery Institute, to tell guests and enthusiasts of the Aurora, how it works. And we think that this is a great STEM opportunity for K-12 kids, summer and winter,” Ramras said.
“I was inspired by the photographs that the Apollo astronauts took on their moon voyages and how we had never seen the Earth as it as it actually appeared before that. You know, we live on this one beautiful blue marble,” Morris said.
Morris’s globe is made of 12 sewn-together fabric printouts of a composite NASA photo of the earth. It’s suspended at a 23-degree angle, just like the tilt of the earth in relationship to the sun.
”So, it functions like a kid's, like a giant bouncy house, with the continuously-operating blower inside, brings in air from up above through the suspension tube. It'll stay perfectly inflated,” Morris said.
All over the globe the lights from cities in the NASA photographs were enhanced by fluorescent paint so when the globe turns toward black lights on one side of the room, all the little lights come on like they do on earth at night.
“I owe a big debt to the space program and NASA because without the cameras and satellites imaging the earth from space, well, first of all, we would have no idea what the earth looked like and we wouldn't be able to create these authentic replicas,” Morris said.
Morris said it was a challenge to find the perfect simulation of the aurora over the globe’s polar regions.
“At first, we thought we'd do it with luminescent paint, like the city lights here. But it needs to be dynamic and moving. So, I tested a bunch of different projectors and found these, you know, it's a pretty reasonable simulation of the actual aurora,” Morris said.
The globe will be surrounded by tablets where visitors can project information onto monitors around the room. There are already interpretive signs and posters mounted on the walls. Including panels from a World War II Canadian comic book.
“One of the Canadian characters was Nelvana of the North. She was an Inuit princess, and we found her comic books, and were able to blow them up into large posters depicting a superhero, that for all intents and purposes, is an Alaska Native. And she was the great protector of the Native people of the Arctic, their food supply, and the oceans,” Ramras said.
Ramras says he’s invited local scientists to an upcoming open house event to view the exhibit before it opens to the public.
