“Astronomy has a way of taking ordinary curiosity and stretching it into big, meaningful questions,” Jeff Rodgers.
At the heart of Sacramento’s MOSAC planetarium, Jeff Rodgers, Planetarium Manager, is turning data into wonder. As a science communicator and visual learning innovator, Rodgers is helping audiences not just see the stars but understand their place among them.
Rodgers’ journey into astronomy began with childhood walks under the night sky, guided by a grandfather who loved the stars but didn’t know much about them. That early awe evolved into a deeper fascination not with the stars themselves, but with the questions they provoke: How do they work? How do we know? How do they connect to us?
Over time, Rodgers’ perspective shifted from seeking answers to embracing the process of inquiry. “The more you learn about the universe,” he says, “the less it feels like a riddle to solve and more like a conversation to stay in.”
One of Rodgers’ most exciting current projects involves the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), whose data was publicly released in March 2025. DESI measures the position and receding velocity of about 40 million galaxies with the goal of constraining a possible model of dark energy. Using AI, Rodgers transformed over 150 million data points into immersive visualizations for MOSAC’s planetarium shows. These maps, drawn from DESI’s Bright Galaxy Survey, reveal the “cosmic web” galaxies strung together in filaments, surrounding vast voids.
“When projected across the dome,” Rodgers explains, “you can see gravity made visible.” The result is a breathtaking view of the universe’s large-scale structure, with our Milky Way just one bead on a vast, invisible thread.
Rodgers is quick to dispel the notion that planetariums are just theaters. “It’s a laboratory for visual learning,” he says. Every show is crafted to balance sensory awe with intellectual clarity, aiming for both “Wow!” and “Ah ha!” moments.
Whether scripting a journey through the stars or designing a Mars Explorers camp, Rodgers focuses on making abstract concepts tangible. One memorable exercise had campers walk 161 steps to represent the 37-million-mile journey to Mars, compared to a single step for the Moon.
If there’s one concept Rodgers believes everyone should grasp, it’s scale. “You can spend a lifetime just wrapping your head around what ‘far’ and ‘long ago’ mean in astronomy,” he says. The light from our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, takes 2.5 million years to reach us, meaning we’re seeing it as it was before humans existed.
Understanding scale, Rodgers argues, puts everyday problems in perspective and highlights the extraordinary nature of human cooperation. “We’re the only species we know of that can even have this conversation.”
Looking ahead, Rodgers is excited by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming sky surveys and the continued revelations from the James Webb Space Telescope. Combined with AI-driven analysis, these tools promise to reshape our understanding of the universe.
But the biggest shift, he says, is cultural. “Astronomy is becoming more open, more interdisciplinary, and more globally connected than ever before. That’s healthy. The universe belongs to everyone.”
Rodgers finds humility in the cosmos, not from feeling small, but from recognizing that significance and insignificance can coexist. “We’re microscopic, yet we’re also the universe trying to make sense of itself,” he reflects. “That’s a strange kind of importance.”
At MOSAC, Rodgers sees curiosity as more than a personal trait, it’s a civic virtue. Whether he’s engaging a six-year-old or a seventy-year-old, the goal is the same: to spark wonder and invite conversation.
“When science stops feeling like a one-way transfer of information and starts feeling like a conversation,” he says, “that’s the best part of the job.”
