VISITOR ATTRACTIONS
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Bringing in entertainment such as films and music allows planetariums to utilise their immersive technology
The current longest-running planetarium in the southern hemisphere, which has been operational since 1955, is located in Montevideo, Uruguay. Their popularity sky-rocketed in the US during the sixties space race, with the Apollo 11 mission’s successful landing on the moon in 1969 reigniting public interest. The following year, the International Planetarium Society was established. After this, in 1973, the first planetarium laser music show premiered at the Griffith Observatory, marking a transformative shift towards alternative uses for these singular buildings. In 1983, Digistar became the first digital planetarium projection system,
or centuries, the idea of using a dome to show the night sky has fascinated mankind. In 1913, Oskar von Miller, founder and first general director of the Deutsches Museum, approached Zeiss concerning the manufacturing of a ‘rotating star sphere’. For the next ten years, engineers, astronomers and physicists all worked on building a device that could project fixed stars and planets into a dome. Miller envisioned a device for the museum that could show visitors movements of the fixed stars, planets, the sun and moon. In 1914, he came up with the groundbreaking idea of making this possible through projection. The world’s first planetarium projector was developed and built by the Zeiss engineers Walther Bauersfeld and
Rudolf Straubel between March 1919 and July 1923, with the world’s first projection planetarium beginning operation in the Deutsches Museum on 7 May 1925. The first Zeiss projector illuminated the dome in Munich with 4500 stars. Planetariums were a phenomenal success among the general public, and over the course of the following years began to crop up across the globe. The Adler Planetarium opened in Chicago in 1930, as the first in the US, while the first in Asia opened in Osaka, Japan in 1937. The Melbourne Planetarium, Australia opened in 1965 and the refurbished Stardome Observatory in Auckland, New Zealand has been in operation since 1997. The London Planetarium, which opened in 1958, was the first in the UK.
which led to projection systems replacing traditional mechanical
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