For the big picture, look to the skies
Steven Winn
Thursday, October 13, 2005
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One of the fall's hottest shows has no script, no music, no human characters and all natural lighting. It's open to anyone with a place to stand and a dome of night sky overhead. The perennially popular planet Mars is now clearly visible on cloudless nights. The run continues through early December.

You'll have plenty of company as you gaze up and wonder at the pinprick of red light soaring through its orbit 43 million miles overhead. Everyone, it seems, is peering toward the heavens these days. Thoughts and dreams, yearnings and nostalgia are heading spaceward with notable frequency. It's all deeply soothing, a collective escape into the fathomless universe at a time when the earth feels so vulnerably small, battered and bruised by earthquakes, hurricanes and assorted man-made woes.

Both a swooning 3-D IMAX movie, "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon," and a celebratory new biography of Neil Armstrong, James R. Hansen's "First Man," recall those first lunar steps of 1969. "Race to the Moon," an excellent American Experience program that airs Oct. 31 on PBS, recaptures the drama of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission that sent three men in orbit around the moon for the first time. Even advertisers are getting into the act. A new television commercial, for the wireless headset company Plantronics, riffs on how Armstrong would have stumbled if he'd been tethered to his module by a telephone cord.

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