Hansen Dome Theater
This theater is the first "pitless" digital dome planetarium in the USA. The dome is a 55-foot (16.8 m) perforated aluminum dome manufactured by Astro-tec Manufacturing Inc. The theater seats 205 and features individual interactive seat button controls. Designed around Evans & Sutherland's Digistar planetarium system, two super-high resolution projectors work together to blend a single seamless video stream over the entire dome. What results is an entirely new way to experience the universe, in 3 dimensions (no glasses required) with a resolution far beyond high definition video. The new system installed in 2011 can display 4096 X 4096 resolution and 60 frames per second.
A specially tuned 13,000 watt sound system with 5.1 surround sound and 21 speakers is installed behind the screen. Shows in this hemispherical theater cover a variety of space-related themes, from fully immersive 3D productions to live-narrated current events programs to family shows to music entertainment performance. Clark Planetarium Productions is one of the few informal science education institutions with the resources to create and distribute its own fulldome animation content.
Read more about this topic: Clark Planetarium
Famous quotes containing the words dome and/or theater:
“A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)