The Planetarium Sky Skipped Cassiopeia
Tomas had volunteered at the town planetarium for three weeks before he noticed that the evening show had a hole in it. The narrator named the Big Dipper, the Swan, and the Hunter, but when the projector rotated toward the north, the sky above the audience simply went blank where the zigzag of Cassiopeia should have glittered.
He mentioned it to Mrs. Alvarado, who ran the dome, and she frowned in the dim glow of the control panel. "That is odd," she said. "The show has worked for years, and nobody has complained." They opened the projector together, a heavy metal ball covered with tiny holes, and shined a flashlight across its surface.
At first everything looked normal. Then Tomas ran his finger along the north side and felt something smooth where a cluster of holes ought to be. A small square of black tape had been pressed over them, edges carefully trimmed.
"Someone covered the stars on purpose," he whispered.
Mrs. Alvarado peeled the tape away and found a folded scrap of paper stuck underneath. It was a note from a long-retired technician named Mr. Penn, who had written that a bad lamp in that corner was scorching the dome with a bright spot and that he had masked the holes until a replacement arrived. The replacement had come and gone, but nobody had ever removed the tape.
They swapped in a fresh bulb that same afternoon. That night, when the lights went down, a W of five bright stars spread across the dome, and a girl in the third row gasped as if she had seen it for the very first time.