Morrison Planetarium

When the Morrison Planetarium first opened its doors in November 1952, it relied on a massive, five-thousand-pound star projector built entirely in-house by the California Academy of Sciences. Following the Second World War, the specialized German-made projectors used in other American planetariums were impossible to acquire, so Academy staff and volunteers leveraged their wartime experience repairing Navy binoculars to construct their own. This homegrown machine remained in continuous operation for fifty-one years and was celebrated for its extraordinary realism, projecting stars with irregular shapes that mimicked the twinkle of the night sky better than the simple circular dots found elsewhere.