Man Spends Life Savings on Backyard Planetarium - COOLEST THING I'VE EVER MADE EP10

The planetarium was built in my backyard over a period of ten years...so I've had some people call it the "sanitarium" because they thought I was crazy. My name is Frank Kovac. I work part-time this time of year when my business is slower cleaning and painting for people. But I've always been good at thinking about projects, fixing things. This homemade doghouse I decided to make for my dog "Sweetheart". It's got a heater here, he's got water that never freezes. He can go in and out anytime he wants. This is his backyard. And he likes to play! C'mon! My dad had a telescope when I was about 13. He showed me the moon and I couldn't believe what I saw. I was so intrigued about the universe when I was 16 I built my own telescope. It's made out of plywood for the support base and a form tube that you used to make concrete with. It's powerful enough to show the gap in the rings of the planet Saturn, the moons of Jupiter... But Coolest Thing I ever made is my homemade planetarium. My main source of income before was a local paper mill. I was thinking of maybe becoming a planetarium director but I am very weak at math and you need a lot of math and science in order to get that degree. So I decided to go a different route which was to build my own planetarium. The planetarium itself was built on site in my backyard. It weighs about 4,000 pounds so I had the foundation actually built around it. It came to be about a hundred and eighty thousand dollars over almost a period of 10 years, so I've had some people call it the "sanitarium" because they thought I was crazy, but I never quit. The globe is mostly sheets of plywood, some panel board. The motor drive is a half horsepower gear motor. The globe itself is mechanically operated it actually revolves around the audience and it's one of two others in the world and it's the largest. I was able to plot each star with glow-in-the-dark paint. I painted all five thousand stars by hand with a tiny paintbrush one dot at a time which took about five months if you averaged eight hours a day. It's real painstaking on my neck, my back. Spent many hours up on the ladder and I would even actually go outside on the clear night to compare how mine looks in here and if I wasn't happy with it I would get out the paint and put more paint on a certain star. The planetarium is big enough to seat up to 25 people sometimes I only have a few people but it doesn't matter I always do a program. "Welcome all of you here to the Kovac Planetarium. The shows are non-scripted I explain the size of the stars, planets. "Sometimes on clear nights, you can see something that most people can't see anymore because they live in a city. What we know as the northern lights." I put about 4,000 customers through here per year. It's a dream come true and I would have to say now the locals are amazed. Just that little bit of time of a parent spending time with a child shows what that led to here. My homemade planetarium is the Coolest Thing I've Ever Made. ok

Channel: Coolest Thing

Views: 210,043

Keywords: coolest thing, coolest thing I've ever made, planetarium, homemade planetarium, backyard planetarium, Frank Kovac, Wisconsin, Backyard Inventor, Inventor, Maker, Backyard maker, coolest thing ever, incredible builds

Id: ohfWqhF0ABs

Length: 3min 49sec (229 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/njmonkeyboy]

Pretty impressed that this is mechanically powered, dude has a serious commitment and doesn't seem as crazy as comments suggest.

Just a dude that loves the stars and his dog.

[u/apollocrush]

So this is what Toby from The Office does in his spare time

[u/TOAST2218]

actually got to meet this guy and lived with one of the guys that helped him. pretty cool guy!