About the only thing more remarkable than the Kovac Planetarium is that on a Wisconsin tourism list of seven man-made wonders, it rated only an honorable mention. Then again, when it’s up against the likes of the Packers’ Lambeau Field and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, maybe that’s to be expected. That and the fact that the planetarium is plopped down in an isolated area of north-woods Wisconsin probably worked against it.
Frank Kovac Jr. is the 46-year-old amateur astronomer who built what he says is “the world’s largest mechanical globe planetarium” on his 4-acre property near Monico, population fewer than 500. When he opened the planetarium in 2007 to his first customers, a woman and her son, it completed 10 years of work largely at night and on weekends that resulted from a lifelong passion inspired by his father in the family’s hometown of Chicago.
