Sun, Moon and Stars

At the heart of the visitors' centre is the digital planetarium - one of very few in Germany. The show takes visitors on a fascinating journey into the Bronze Age. Under the dome of the planetarium, the complex astronomical knowledge encoded into the Sky Disc is explained. Those who could "read" the stars with it were masters of time. Over 3600 years ago, it allowed its users to combine the sun and moon calendars and to determine important dates in the yearly calendar. The audience can also track the course of the sun, moon and the stars above eastern Germany and take a virtual flight through the solar observatory in Goseck.

Specialists from the Hamburg Planetarium spent for over a year to create this unique show, working in close cooperation with the museum of prehistory in Halle (Saale). Within the virtual worlds of the on-site studio at Hamburg Planetarium, nineteen interconnected servers with a combined storage capacity of 14 terabytes performed the calculations necessary to produce the impressive images for the sequence, which is comprised of a total of 40,000 individual images with four million pixels each. Special attention was paid to the quality of the voiceover and music, as well. The narrator Bernd Vollbrecht is, among other things, the German voice of Antonio Banderas.

The music was provided by Alexander van Bubenheim, who has been a successful composer of film music in Hollywood for many years.
The show is projected onto the seven-metre high dome using four interlinked computers. Two PCs each project half of the dome image, another supplies the 5.1 surround sound and a further one controls the system and ensures that everything runs smoothly. The images are merged seamlessly using two DLP data projectors and a fisheye lens. This so-called "definiti Twin" digital planetarium system from the American supplier Sky-Skan can simulate the night sky for a freely definable location and point in time in the past, present or future.