Thursday, September 18, 2008

Astonished By Watching the Beauty of Space in the Near By Planetarium

It was in my 9th standard, when I had an opportunity to go for a planetarium. I was not aware of what really the planetarium really is all about. My friends and I had a long discussion on that but no one really had an idea of that. When I visited it then I came to know what it was actually.

Planetarium was a theater built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation. It consisted of a large dome-shaped projection screen onto which the space pictures, scenes of stars, planets and other celestial objects made to appear and move realistically to simulate the complex 'motions of the heavens'. The celestial scenes were created using a wide variety of technologies, for example precision-engineered 'star balls' that combine optical and electro-mechanical technology, slide projector, video and full dome projector systems, and lasers.

Whatever technologies were used, the objective was normally to link them together to provide an accurate relative motion of the sky. Typical systems were set to display the sky at any point in time, past or present, and often to show the night sky as it would appear from any point of latitude on Earth. One thing which my focus went on to was on the picture of solar system which consisted of the Sun; the eight official planets, at least three "dwarf planets", more than 130 satellites of the planets, a large number of small bodies (the comets and asteroids), and the interplanetary medium.

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