Planetarium News

As the construction of the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre here in Garching continues apace, ready for its opening in Spring 2018, ESO continues to make an unprecedented range of high-quality materials available for use in planetariums, produced by world-renowned astrophotographers, artists, technicians and musicians.

The latest additions to our collection include:

1. New 4k live fulldome webcams for ALMA and VLT, new deep-sky night-time cameras. These new webcams show many wonderful day- and night-time phenomena live from the observatories, such as zodiacal light, gegenschein, airglow, atmospheric absorption and diffraction.
2. New free music tracks produced for our archive by our new music ambassadors.
3. More ESO fulldome clips, including stunning timelapses of ESO’s observatories, an artist’s impression of the TRAPPIST-1 system, and renderings of violent events in the Universe such as a black hole devouring a star and merging stars creating a supernova.
4. More ESA/Hubble fulldome clips.
5. More beautiful image compositions for museums, images and videos for exhibition use in spectacular high resolution — up to 20 000 pixels wide. These will form part of the ESO Supernova Living Universe Exhibition.
6. Fronteras (Borders); a fulldome show based on social uses of astronomy, produced by the Medellin Planetarium in Colombia. The show was directed by Carlos Augusto Molina.
7. VR movies: these 360 x 180-degree immersive-experience movies are a new product type that can be used with Virtual Reality (VR) glasses like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Google Cardboard.
   The first movies are:
   1. The CLUES simulation in up to 16k x 8k format produced by the Adler Planetarium.
   2. A VR view of the famous TRAPPIST-1 system.
8. Short stories told in a fulldome format were shown as part of the Latino Dome Fest, which took place in May 2016 at the Medellin Planetarium in Colombia, including: Multiverse, Possible Worlds, Seven, The Wish, and Improper.
9. Seeing, a fulldome planetarium show exploring some of the fascinating processes of the cosmos, from astrophysics to the biology of the eye and brain.
10. Phantom of the Universe, a new impressive fulldome planetarium show designed to immerse audiences in the search for dark matter, produced by CERN’s MediaLab.
11. The Reefs of Belize, fulldome underwater footage exploring the Mesoamerican reef ecosystem, at Glover’s Reef Research Station in Belize, produced by the Museum of Science in Boston.
12. Recorded live stream with impressions from the Data to Dome workshop at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo.
13. Out There, a new planetarium show available online with lots of extras.

You can find a list of the previously added materials in our earlier announcement here, and in our collection on the ESO Supernova website.

We are confident that this collection will contribute to the continued success of the planetarium community which we at the ESO Supernova are so proud and excited to be a part of. If you in turn would like to help sustain the continued production of free resources for planetariums and to keep the ESO Supernova free you can:

1. Make a donation
2. Email [email protected] to contribute a translation in your language
3. Or let us know on our social media if you have made use of any of our products!

More Information

The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre

The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre is a cooperation between the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). The building is a donation from the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (KTS), a German foundation, and ESO runs the facility.

Courtesy of European Southern Observatory