Presidential candidate John McCain probably thought he was on safe ground when attacking rival Barack Obama’s earmarking of funds for a Chicago planetarium.

As we reported yesterday, he repeated his previous attack on this front, noting:

He [Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?

While this may not prove to have been as significant a misstep as Dean’s scream or Dukakis’s tank episode McCain is taking some flack.

For starters the planetarium has issued a statement saying, “Senator McCain’s statements about the Adler Planetarium’s request for federal support do not accurately reflect the museum’s legislative history or relationship with Senator Obama.”

The Adler goes to say its Zeiss Mark VI projector is not an overhead projector and that it “has never received an earmark as a result of Senator Obama’s efforts”

As MSNBC’s Cosmic Log notes:

The 40-year-old projector currently being used by the world-class planetarium is failing, and it’s so obsolete that spare parts aren’t available anymore. Obama and other members of the Illinois congressional delegation sought federal funds for a replacement.

That request fell by the wayside, and the funds never came through.

Phil ‘Bad Astronony’ Plait adds:

The honorable thing for him [McCain] to do now is to admit he was wrong, admit he mischaracterized both the planetarium and Obama’s stance, and then issue a public apology to planetarians and science-lovers across the country.

Chicago Breaking News says according to the Adler both New York and Los Angeles planetariums have had federal funding to replace Ziess projection systems.

“The Planetarium item dramatizes the know-nothing, anti-science, anti-education attitudes of the McCain voter base, as well as his cynicism,” says Huffinton Post columnist Julse Siegel. “I think this is an opportunity to highlight that.”

Image: Zeiss projector / Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum