If you’re looking to land on the surface of the moon or take a look at Saturn’s rings, you don’t have to be an astronaut.
On Saturday, the St. Louis Science Center is reopening the McDonnell Planetarium after five months with upgrades that allow visitors to view the universe in ways they haven’t before.
The upgrades include an improved surround sound, a Goto Chiron III hybrid star projector and a Digistar projection system. This will make the hybrid planetarium one of the largest and most advanced in the United States, said Will Snyder, the planetarium’s manager.
Snyder said the upgrades will let visitors experience greater detail than before.
“Instead of just showing you, ‘Hey, this is Saturn in the sky,’ we can now fly you out to Saturn and show you what it would be like to visit it,” Snyder said.
He said the planetarium’s old projection system did a good job at looking at the sky from Earth, but that’s all it could do.
“You couldn’t go anywhere else, and if it wasn’t a star or a constellation, you really couldn’t show it to people in a convincing or engaging way,” Snyder said.
He said that with the new upgrades, visitors can see things like black holes or exoplanets that they had no way of easily exploring before.
Inside the Bill and Laura Orthwein StarBay Theater, ethereal sounds float through the air, making the sights of twinkling stars and planets feel a little more real.
In less than a minute, the blank dome screen transforms into a massive 3D blue-green orb, giving viewers the illusion that they aren’t in a theater but thousands of miles above the planet.
These types of views aren’t just limited to Earth. Red, yellows and blues of nebulas bleed together on screen, and the particles of Saturn’s rings look close enough to touch.
“A planet like Saturn is, of course, always a favorite with its rings,” Snyder said. “So we can use the entire dome above us basically as our canvas.”
According to Snyder, the planetarium’s previous star projector was installed in 2001. He said that at that time there were fewer than 1,000 satellites in orbit, but today there are more than 10,000.
“A lot has changed both in terms of our knowledge of space and how we explore the universe,” Snyder said. “So we wanted the technology we have to be able to bring all that current knowledge back down to Earth and get people excited about it.”
Snyder said that with satellites being launched every day, efforts to establish a presence on the moon and numerous deep space missions, it feels like we are living through a second space race.
“For us at the planetarium, we have tools now to share those discoveries with people, to get them excited about not only what we’re learning, but what we still have to learn, what awaits us to discover out in space,” Snyder said.
The new projection system cost $2.5 million. Snyder said the upgrades were made possible by the Centene Foundation.