Innovation Special Planetariums 9 - Carl Zeiss Planetariums

Worth Visiting: the World’s Largest
Planetarium Dome in Nagoya
Dr. Manabu Noda
Chief of Planetarium, Nagoya City Science Museum
The Nagoya City Science Museum was
renovated and reopened on March 19th,
2011. The main feature of our museum
is the world’s largest planetarium dome
at 35 m in diameter. Images are projected
by UNIVERSARIUM Model IX (an
optical planetarium) and the SKYMAX
DS II-R2 (a digital planetarium). The
whole system was unified and installed
by Konica Minolta Planetarium Co. Ltd.
24 Innovation Special Planetariums 9, 2012
History
The Astronomy Building with a planetarium
in the Nagoya City Science Museum
opened in honor of the 70th anniversary
of Nagoya city in 1962, followed by the
Science & Technology Building in 1964
and the Life Science Building later in
1982. It is one of the best comprehensive
science-museums in Japan. We had
been using a Model IV large-dome planetarium
projection machine from Carl
Zeiss since 1962. However, it had been
almost 50 years since the Astronomy
and the Science & Technology Buildings
were built, there were many problems
such as deterioration aging and luck of
earthquake resistance. So Nagoya city
planned to reconstruct the Nagoya City
Science Museum (except the Life Science
building) as a long-term city development
plan and announced the brief
outlines of the basic project.