The Planetarium of Nagoya City Science Museum

The Nagoya City Science Museum, at the center of Nagoya City in central Japan, can be easily recognized by its enormous silver globe, called Brother Earth, that appears to hang in the air, wedged between two buildings. The globe, which looks incredible from the outside, is home to the largest planetarium in the world with a 35-meter projection screen. The planetarium is equipped with two state-of-the-art projectors — the Universarium Model IX (optical planetarium) and the Skymax DSII-R2 (digital planetarium) —  that is capable of accurately displaying the positions and brightness of more than 9,000 fixed stars visible to the naked eye from any location on earth, as well as the every-day motion of the planets and the phases of the moon. The planetarium was opened in 2011, when much of the museum was renovated. The old Science & Technology and Astronomy buildings were replaced by a new wing that housed the planetarium globe, and since then the planetarium has become the major attraction and symbol of the museum. Photo credit When the Nagoya City Science Museum was opened in 1962 in honor of the 70th anniversary of Nagoya city, the old Astronomy Building had a smaller planetarium. The old planetarium had a Model IV large-dome planetarium projection machine from Carl Zeiss, installed in the same year. Two years later, the Science & Technology Building was added and later the Life Science Building in 1982. The museum was one of the best comprehensive science-museums in Japan. But 50 years later the old projector began showing signs of aging. So the city decided to reconstruct the astronomy and the science and technology section of the Nagoya City Science Museum. The museum remained closed for nearly seven months. When it was reopened in March 2011, it had the largest planetarium in the world, beating the previous record holder — the Ehime Prefectural Science Museum in Niihama City, also in Japan — by 5 meters.