Starry Night Express August 30, 2010

The Burke Baker Planetarium is offering a new show for stargazers of all ages with both live and pre-recorded sections. First the planetarium operator tours the night sky for the night and the upcoming weekend. Audiences can practice finding constellations, planets, the moon, meteor showers and the Milky Way band. Then the show will drop into a star party led by Laurence Fishburne. From this country setting, the show takes audiences through the solar system and into the Universe. Breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope hover and combine to show the life cycle of stars. Audiences experience the eventual collision of our Milky Way Galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy as visualized by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Then visitors plunge down and sweep through the gigantic Valles Marineris canyon, simulated by the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, using the latest data from the Mars Global Surveyor.