Attraction Review: Armagh Planetarium

After all of the festive lazing around and eating our weight in chocolate, we decided that we needed to get out of the house for a few hours. Armagh Planetarium has always been a favourite educational visit of mine and it just so happened that we had a fewLivingSocial vouchers allowing cheaper entry.

So we headed down to Armagh, stopping for a delicious meal atUluru on the way. Opening times for the Planetarium are 10am – 5pm with shows being displayed every hour. Tickets must be prebooked in advance too, so be sure to ring up beforehand.

The show that was playing when we went was called “Experience the Aurora”, here’s a brief description:

‘Over seven months in the Arctic Circle, former Armagh Planetarium Director Terence Murtagh captured timelapse images of the Aurora Borealis with high resolution digital SLR cameras outfitted with fisheye lenses. The results are spectacular. For the first time the aurora has been captured as it was meant to be experienced, as a display that covers the entire sky. This immersive show shares the science behind the aurora and tells the story of our quest to find and photograph the aurora for wraparound display in fulldome theaters.’

I’m not going to lie, as an aurora enthusiast myself I was very excited to see this show (I even went to Norway early last year in search of the Northern Lights), and it didn’t disappoint. Before the show there was a short introduction and a little pre-show of a collage of entries to the children’s Christmas card competition that was held before Christmas. This was very well done and a nice festive touch to the outing. After this we reclined our seats and prepared for the show.

Lasting about 25 minutes, the show was one of the best I’ve seen at the Planetarium and it delved right into the science of the aurora itself and why and when they occur, alongside stunning imagery. The theatre that the shows are viewed in is extremely impressive in itself; its hemispherical screens mean that once you recline your seat and the lights go down, all you can see is the night sky projected all around you. The theatre uses the Digistar 3 system currently, and from now until the 19th January the Planetarium will be closed in order to upgrade this system to Digistar 5. Although an inconvenience for now, we look forward to see how this upgraded system makes viewing the shows even better and more realistic than they already are!