Welcome to the UW campus planetarium
In this site you will find information on times and dates the planetarium is
open, connections to school activities to do before and after your visit,
and information about this volunteer outreach effort. Here are some highlights:
Public Shows: Saturday April 21, 2012 (1pm, 1:30pm, 2pm, 2:30pm, 3pm, 3:30pm)
As part of the Dean's Showcase, during Husky Fest, the Department of Astronomy will be open (on a space-available basis) for public planetarium shows, highlighting the work of UW students and their faculty advisor. These approximately half-hour immersive media shows meld digital imagery derived from ground- and space-based telescopes. The shows highlight the superb contributions to the digital planetarium of student leads Jake VanderPlas, Nancy Thomas, Amit Misra, Laura Mayorga, and Philip Rosenfield, and their faculty advisor on the planetarium, Prof. Andy Connolly.
Free tickets will be available in-person on a first-come, first-served basis on the afternoon of April 21, adjacent to the planetarium. Free tickets for each specific showtime will be handed out, until each show's maximum capacity is reached (40 people per show).
Daytime Group Visits
We welcome school groups studying astronomy, public groups (astronomy
clubs, scouts, etc), and on-campus groups to visit the
planetarium on Fridays during the regular University school year.
For more information, click the tab on the left.
UW Planetarium in the news
March 2011: Perspectives article about the completed digital upgrade.
December 2010:
TechWeek preview of the nearly complete upgrade.
January 2009: Planetarium featured in the UW Daily
About our planetarium
Built with the new building in 1994, the 30 foot diameter dome of the
UW planetarium provides a unique space in which students can explore
the night sky.
The original building included a Minolta MS-8 starball. The starball
is a precisely constructed
optical/mechanical system that projects an accurate picture of the
night sky as viewed from anywhere on earth.
In 2005, a grad-student led UW Student Tech Fee proposal provided
$90,000 worth of new audio and video equipment to allow for more
dynamic planetarium presentations.
In 2009, we began working with Microsoft's
World Wide Telescope team
to upgrade the planetarium to a fully digital dome system. Completed in
early 2011, this upgrade transformed the dome into an 8-million pixel
digital display. When combined with the World-Wide telescope interface, this
allows for a truly interactive and immersive planetarium experience.
Technical details about the digital upgrade
can be found in this preprint.
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