Press Releases

10 October 2016: Evans & Sutherland (E&S) has signed a three-year partnership agreement with ESO as a Constellation Partner in the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre. Having developed advanced computer graphical technologies for over forty years, E&S was the world’s first computer graphics company, and now specialises in a world-leading digital planetarium system, Digistar. The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre is a cooperation between the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). The building is a donation from the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (KTS), a German foundation, and ESO runs the facility. Through their collaboration with ESO, E&S will be providing this cutting-edge planetarium technology for use in the forthcoming ESO Supernova, and will be the first to receive daily astronomy news and data directly from research carried out in observatories around the world through the Data2Dome project. Data2Dome, which ESO is spearheading with support from the ...

1 September 2016: As the construction of the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre here in Garching continues apace, ready for its opening in late 2017, ESO continues to make an unprecedented range of high-quality materials available for use in planetariums, produced by world-renowned astrophotographers, artists, technicians and musicians. Both the mission and vision of the ESO Supernova emphasise the creation of connections and learning experiences for both scientists and the general public; in keeping with this, and with ESO’s ethos in general, all of these planetarium products are available for free. Quality comes before quantity, but thanks to the dedicated work of both our team and the planetarium community at large, we are able to offer both. The full range of free material for planetariums is available on the ESO Supernova website. This comprises: Almost 400 fulldome clips in ESO’s and ESA/Hubble’s archives. These include more than 100 Ultrafast Time-lapse videos by ...

7 November 2015: The world’s first full-length fulldome planetarium movie freely available for planetarium use, From Earth to the Universe, has been released in high-resolution 4k fulldome format, for the worldwide planetarium community to download and use. This stunning, 30-minute voyage through time and space conveys, through an arresting combination of sights and sounds, the Universe revealed to us by science. The show was produced for the ESO Supernova Planetarium and Visitor Centre, which will open in 2017. Until then, the show will be shown in planetariums worldwide and have its world premiere at the Νew Digital Planetarium of the Eugenides Foundation in Athens, Greece and at Hamburg Planetarium in Germany, on the 22 June 2015. The night sky, both beautiful and mysterious, has been the subject of campfire stories, ancient myths and awe for as long as there have been people. A desire to comprehend the Universe may well be humanity’s oldest ...

26 October 2014: ESO is pleased to present Journey to the Centre of the Milky Way, its first short fulldome planetarium mini-show produced in-house. The mini-show is available for previewing and as a series of fulldome frames for free download (lightly compressed jpegs, 98 GB). The seven-minute mini-show in 4k resolution starts in the dry and empty Atacama Desert in Chile, home of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). Thanks to the extraordinary air conditions, in combination with the technological power of the VLT, we can take the beautiful images that make up this show, which leads us into the very centre of the Milky Way, where the view is mostly blocked by dust and gas. By observing the heart of the galaxy over a period of twenty years the VLT and the Keck telescopes were able to observe the motion of more than 100 stars and identify the exact position of an otherwise ...

24 June 2014: With our upcoming ESO Supernova — Planetarium and Visitor Centre here in Garching in mind, the ESO education and Public Outreach Department has started producing high-quality material for use in fulldome planetarium shows in the facility from 2017. As part of our mandate to communicate astronomy with our Member States and beyond, we are making this material available for free to other planetariums. This was announced today at the 2014 meeting of the International Planetarium Society in Beijing. The first initiative we have undertaken in this respect is the ESO Ultra HD Expedition, where four world-renowned astrophotographers travelled to Chile to capture the Universe in ultra HD and fulldome format. We would like to share the fulldome results of the expedition through these dynamic links, which will update as more materials become available: UHD fulldome stills (fish-eye, 4K) (adding to ESO’s collection fulldome stills) UHD fulldome timelapses (adding to ESO’s ...