A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation.
The Adler Planetarium is a public museum in Chicago, Illinois, dedicated to astronomy and astrophysics. It was founded in 1930 by local businessman Max Adler. Located on the northeastern tip of Northerly Island on Lake Michigan, the Adler Planetarium was the first planetarium in the United States. It is part of Chicago's Museum Campus, which includes the John G. Shedd Aquarium and The Field Museum. The Planetarium's mission is to inspire exploration and understanding of the universe.
Griffith Observatory is an observatory in Los Angeles, California, on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park. It commands a view of the Los Angeles Basin including Downtown Los Angeles to the southeast, Hollywood to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. The observatory is a popular tourist attraction with a close view of the Hollywood Sign and an extensive array of space and science-related displays. It is named after its benefactor, Griffith J. Griffith. Admission has been free since the observatory's opening in 1935, in accordance with the benefactor's will.
The Saint Louis Science Center, founded as a planetarium in 1963, is a collection of buildings including a science museum and planetarium in St. Louis, Missouri, on the southeastern corner of Forest Park. With over 750 exhibits in a complex of over 300,000 square feet (28,000 m2), it is among the largest of its type in the United States.
The William M. Staerkel Planetarium is a planetarium at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois. It is the second largest planetarium in the state, the largest being the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and has the first Carl Zeiss M1015 opto-mechanical star projector installed in the western hemisphere. The Staerkel Planetarium provides science education programs and light show entertainment to as many as 40,000 people each year. It has a 50-foot dome, seats 144, and private group and school show reservations can be made beyond the regular public offerings.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Since 1996, he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.
The Clark Planetarium is a planetarium and science museum situated within The Gateway at the intersection of 400 West and 100 South in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The Clark Planetarium opened in April 2003, replacing the historic Hansen Planetarium under a grant from the Clark Foundation in cooperation with Salt Lake County.
A Zeiss projector is one of a line of planetarium projectors manufactured by the Carl Zeiss Company. Main models include Copernican (1924), Model I (1925), Model II (1926), Model III (1957), Model IV (1957), Model V (1965), Model VI (1968), Spacemaster (1970), Cosmorana (1984), Skymaster ZKP2 (1977), and Skymaster ZKP3 (1993).
The Fleet Science Center is a science museum and planetarium in Balboa Park in San Diego, California. Established in 1973, it was the first science museum to combine interactive science exhibits with a planetarium and an IMAX Dome (OMNIMAX) theater, setting the standard that most major science museums follow today. It is located at the east end of the El Prado Drive walkway, next to the Bea Evenson Fountain and plaza in central Balboa Park.
The McLaughlin Planetarium is a former working planetarium whose building occupies a space immediately to the south of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, at 100 Queen's Park. Founded by a grant from philanthropist Colonel R. Samuel McLaughlin, the facility was opened to the public on October 26, 1968. It had, for its time, a state-of-the-art electro-mechanical Zeiss planetarium projector that was used to project regular themed shows about the stars, planets, and cosmology for visitors. By the 1980s the planetarium's sound-system and domed ceiling were used to display dazzling music-themed laser-light shows. The lower levels of the planetarium contained a gallery called the "Astrocentre" that featured space-related exhibits, related artifacts on the history of astronomy and was also home of the world's first commercial Stellarium
A planetarium projector, also known as a star projector, is a device used to project images of celestial objects onto the dome in a planetarium.
Chabot Space and Science Center, located in Oakland, California, is a center for learning in Earth and space science, which features interactive exhibits, planetariums, a large screen theater, hands-on activities, and three powerful telescopes.
The Discovery Science Center and Planetarium is a hands-on science center in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that serves as both a tourist destination and an educational resource for area schools. The Discovery Science Center provides dynamic, hands-on STEM experiences designed to resonate with the innate curiosity, learning desire, and spirit of exploration of visitors, encouraging young learners to ask questions, solve problems, and engineer solutions today so they are better prepared to embrace the challenges of tomorrow.
Centered in the Universe is a fulldome presentation that premiered the evening of October 29, 2006, at the "Galactic Gala," which marked the reopening of the renovated Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. The 33-minute planetarium program utilizes a Zeiss Universarium star projector and an innovative laser video projection system developed by Evans & Sutherland to create an immersive environment. A live presenter narrates the script.
Armand Neustadter Spitz was an American planetarium designer.
Bryan-Gooding Planetarium in the Alexander Brest Science Theatre is a planetarium in the Museum of Science and History in Jacksonville, Florida, U.S. It was built in 1988 and featured a 60-foot-diameter (18 m) dome-shaped projection screen, JBL stereo sound system, and a Zeiss Jena Optical mechanical planetarium star projector. The facility has seating for 200, and approximately 60,000 people see a planetarium show each year.
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation. WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional (3D) Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background (CMB), viewing both visual imagery and scientific data about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light. The software utilizes Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine technologies to function. WWT can also be used to visualize arbitrary or abstract data sets and time series data.
David H. Grinspoon is an American astrobiologist. He is the Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA and was the former inaugural Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology for 2012–2013.
The Galileo Galilei planetarium, commonly known as Planetario, is located in Parque Tres de Febrero in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet is a book written by the astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson. The book is about Pluto, which was demoted to the status of dwarf planet in August 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, thereby depriving it of its planet-hood. The book also focuses on the fact that many Americans rallied their support for this icy dwarf on the edge of the Solar System because it was discovered by an American.
