The Man Who Painted the Universe: The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the North Woods

132 Pages·2015·6.953 MB·English

by  Ron Legro, Avi Lank

The Man Who
Painted
the Universe

tHe story oF a
in tHe Heart oF tHe
ron leGro & aVi lanK
Wisconsin Historical society Press
Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855
© 2015 by Ron Legro and Avrum Lank
For permission to reuse material from The Man Who Painted the Universe
(978-0-87020-711-2; e-book ISBN: 978-0-87020-712-9), please access
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All photographs are from the collection of Frank A. Kovac Jr. unless
otherwise credited.
Photographs identified with WHi or WHS are from the Society’s collections;
address requests to reproduce these photos to the Visual Materials Archivist
at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706.
Front cover: Shutterstock; back cover: photograph by Dean Acheson
Printed in Wisconsin, USA
Cover design by Anders Hanson, Mighty Media
Interior design and typesetting by Integrated Composition Systems,
Spokane, Washington
19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Legro, Ron.
The man who painted the universe : the story of a planetarium in the
heart of the north woods / Ron Legro & Avi Lank.
pages cm
Summary: The story of Frank Kovac, who built a planetarium in the
woods of Wisconsin
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-87020-711-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-87020-712-9
(e-book) 1. Kovac, Frank, 1965– 2. Astronomers—Wisconsin—
Biography. 3. Astronomy. 4. Planetariums. I. Lank, Avi.
II. Title. III. Title: Planetarium in the north woods.
QB36.K685L44 2015
520.92—dc23
[B] 2014039426
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
to Michele and Dannette
y
a
nl
Fi
y
s
et
B
y
Frank Kovac’s World b
p
a
M
ConTents
Prologue: Dream Descending f ix
1 Billions and Billions f 1
2 From Hungary to the stars f 12
3 off He Goes, into the Wild Blue yonder f 24
4 of Hodags and Poniatowski f 28
5 the Mud creek observatory f 39
6 oh, cloudy night f 46
7 spinning the skies f 52
8 all Fall Down f 59
y
nla 9 the Weight of the World f 65
Fi
etsy 10 Mettle on Metal f 76
B
by 11 the Michelangelo of the north Woods f 87
p
a
M
12 a soul Proprietorship f 94
13 to the Painted Universe and Beyond f 100
epilogue: after the Universe, What? f 107
acknowledgments f 111
a note on sources f 115

f¥ Prologue
e
Dream descending
i dream things that never were;
and i say “Why not?”
—George Bernard shaw, Back to Methuselah
On a near-freezing March evening in 2001, Frank A. Kovac Jr.’s
dream came crashing down around him, all 3,500 pounds of
it. The dream was a hollow wooden globe twenty-two feet in
diameter, and it had just become a deadly object.
Working mostly alone inside his makeshift construction
shed in tiny Monico, Wisconsin, Frank had spent four years of
hard work fashioning this globe. He was pursuing an ultimate
goal: building a working planetarium in the unlikely environs
of Wisconsin’s secluded North Woods.
With great care that night, he had winched the globe off the
floor and onto what was supposed to be its permanent home, a
thick wooden base ring, inclined and rigged with wheels, which
would let him rotate his planetarium—a unique structure, as far
as he knew. Frank was inspecting his handiwork close to the
ring when, with a creaking noise, the globe began to sway. “Uh-
oh, here it goes,” Frank recalls thinking. And then, ruefully,
“Well, that was a mistake.”
Reacting quickly, he ran to the center of the floor under-
neath the globe, as far away from its inner surface as he could
get. Frank crouched as the globe slid off the angled ring and hit
the floor. Years later, he remembers how it sounded: “There
ix