Bryanna Lopez, age 9, couldn't wait to see the planetarium show.

"I like space," she told me as she waited with her fellow third-graders outside the Fujitsu Planetarium at De Anza College last Wednesday morning. "I want to be an astronomer when I grow up."

Oh really? And what exactly does an astronomer do?

"It's so scientifical," she said, her eyes wide with wonder. "You get to use a telescope to look up and see the stars and find out what they are made of. I think they are made of dust and gas all shmooshed together."

For any kid who loves to look up at the stars — and what kid doesn't? — a trip to the planetarium is an absolute must of awe and fun and mind-expansion all shmooshed together.

Decades later, I still carry such fond memories of my school field trips to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Leaning back in a big, comfy chair in the hushed, dim, circular room, gazing at a sky filled with thousands more stars than I could ever see in my light-polluted front yard, even on a moonless night. Trying to comprehend a universe so vast that the light from a single star could take millions of years to reach me.

Discovering the stars

This was Bryanna's first visit to a planetarium, and she almost didn't get to go at all. Budget cuts have forced schools like hers, Goss Elementary School in San Jose's Alum Rock district, to eliminate field trips. The Fujitsu

Planetarium, which serves more than 25,000 K-8 students a year, charges children only $4.50 admission, but that's more than many parents can afford.

Caron Blinick, dean of community and continuing education at De Anza, was alarmed last fall when apologetic teachers started calling to sadly cancel their field trips. Others asked for special individual scholarships. She received a heart-rending letter from a third-grade teacher about how the trip to the planetarium is a "voyage of discovery" for students who are being introduced to science for the first time, especially for English-language learners who can absorb so much more knowledge from seeing the constellations in the planetarium sky than merely reading about them in books.

"We all know that kids get hooked on science and math at an early age," Blinick said, "and if you miss that window, it's harder to get them into it later."

Sponsor a field trip

Canceling shows also hurts the planetarium, which depends on ticket sales to keep the star lights on.

Then Blinick came up with an idea: Why not ask folks in the community who love science to sponsor field trips? A $5 donation would cover the cost of one child; $150 would get a whole class in to see the show. For $700, she could fill the 140-seat auditorium.

She took the idea to Jennifer Dirking at the Foothill De Anza Foundation, who loved it.

"Caren's very entrepreneurial," Dirking said.

They made an appeal to loyal planetarium supporters and quickly raised $6,000. Now they've made it easy for anyone to sponsor a field trip with a link on the planetarium Web site: planetarium.deanza.edu/sponsor.

It was because of someone's kind donation that Bryanna, the future astronomer, and her classmates got to see the planetarium.

As the last light faded from the auditorium and the show began, a chorus of oohs and ahhs rose from the audience. The first part of the show was a movie projected on the ceiling, a special-effects digital voyage to the moon and the sun. Then the planetarium's technical director, Karl von Ahnen, turned on the star projector and took the children on a tour of the night sky as it would appear that night in their neighborhood. Little fingers pointed to the planets and called out the names of the constellations, and von Ahnen fielded a torrent of questions:

"Why can't we see Jupiter?"

"where are the planets' moons?"

"Why is Orion's belt so famous?"

With his wild gray hair and long beard, Von Ahnen, 63, looks the part of the classic astronomer. Each time he welcomes a group of first-timers to the planetarium, he gets to recapture the excitement he felt as a boy, the first time he looked through a telescope at his home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He feeds off the children's excitement, his gentle, musical voice barely containing his own awe at the wonders of the universe.

"Planetariums are magical kinds of places," he says. "What kid doesn't love to look at the stars?"