Phoenix Science Museum's Upgraded Planetarium

Today I headed over to the Phoenix Science Museum to get some shots of their newly improved planetarium. The Phoenix Planetarium now boasts the most technologically advanced system in the world and is much more than just a presentation of a few stars. It was really pretty fascinating.

Unfortunately, I was only allowed to take pictures when there weren't any people in the theater, so I tried to include the seats in the foreground to give the planetarium some sense of scale. If you get a chance to shoot there, I would say that this is one of those rare assignments that warrants using a fish-eye lens because of how huge and encompassing the ceiling screen is.

There were nebulae...

Our moon...

A close-up tour of Saturn's rings (notice the rows of seats and you'll get a feel for how immense this screen is)...

Lastly, the curators put every little extra the system had to offer up on the screen for me. They turned on all of the constellations, the cardinal directions, a scale showing the course of the earth through the solar system at each month, and a 3-dimensional grid of the universe...Really amazing.