London Planetarium - History

History

Opened in 1958 on the site of an old cinema that was destroyed in the Second World War, the planetarium seated an audience of around 330 beneath a horizontal dome approximately 18 m in diameter. For its first five decades of operation, an opto-mechanical star projector offered the audience a show based on a view of the night sky as seen from earth. Between 1977 and 1990, evening laser performances called 'Laserium' (see Ivan Dryer) were held. In 1995, one of the world's first digital planetarium systems, Digistar II (created by Evans & Sutherland) was installed in a £4.5 million redevelopment, allowing monochromatic 3D journeys through space and many other kinds of show to be presented. The planetarium was used to teach students from University College London's astronomy department the complexity of the Celestial coordinate system, allowing for practical lectures delivered by a team of planetarium and UCL staff.

In 1986 the planetarium was mentioned in the song "Dickie Davies Eyes" by Half Man Half Biscuit, which claimed that Brian Moore's head "looks uncannily like London Planetarium."

In 2004, the Planetarium was upgraded to a full-colour Digistar 3 system that allows both pre-rendered and real-time shows to transport the audience in an immersive fulldome video environment to distant realms of time and space.

In January 2006, freelance journalist Paul Sutherland broke the news in the London Evening Standard that the London Planetarium was being renamed the Auditorium and would replace astronomical presentations with entertainment shows. Madame Tussauds subsequently announced that in July 2006 the Auditorium would open with a show by Aardman Animations about celebrities. To say 'farewell' to the planetarium, Madame Tussauds allowed free entry to the show in its penultimate, week (24–30 April 2006).