Planetarium Show Times and Descriptions

Each month we (usually) have Wyoming Skies constellation talks on even numbered Tuesdays, Dome Club interactive dome time on Thursday 4-7pm, live science talks on Friday 7PM, educational films at 2PM and 7PM on Saturdays, and music shows at 8:30PM on Fridays and Saturdays. Check back here for next months shows! (We close for campus/federal holidays)

Purchase tickets online with credit card

5/2 7pm Leftovers! Asteroids, Comets, Meteors, and Rings - We learn about the 8 major planets from a young age but what about everything else in the solar system? The little things out there have major impacts on the worlds around us. Locked inside them are the secrets of how the planets formed and life could have arose. We've learned about them from bright meteor streaks in the sky, fireballs, comet tails, craters. Now space missions have just begun exploring these trinkets like on asteroid Bennu and comet CG-67P. What's NASA doing to learn about and defend Earth from these celestial curiosities?

5/2 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Retro Rock Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/3 2pm The Sun: Our Living Star The Sun has shone on our world for four and a half billion years. The light that warms our skin today has been felt by every person who has ever lived. It is our nearest star and our planet’s powerhouse, the source of the energy that drives our winds, our weather and all life. The passage of the Sun’s fiery disc across the sky — day by day, month by month — was the only way to keep track of time for countless past civilisations. Don’t be fooled by the terminology; although it is a typical dwarf star, the Sun consumes 600 million tons of hydrogen each second and is 500 times as massive as all the planets combined.Discover the secrets of our star in this planetarium show and experience never-before-seen images of the Sun’s violent surface in immersive fulldome format.

5/3 7pm Sunstruck! Travel back to the beginning of time and experience the birth of the Sun. Discover how it came to support life, how it threatens life as we know it, and how its energy will one day fade away.

5/3 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Taylor Swift Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/6 7pm Wyoming Skies: eta Auqariids Meteor Shower - What’s up in the sky around Wyoming: stars, constellations, planets, meteor showers, and more. Each show we highlight a new or upcoming celestial event. After the planetarium show finishes at 8pm, we are available to host informal telescope observing on the rooftop of the Physical Sciences Building at the STAR Observatory (weather permitting).

5/9 7pm "Hotter than the Sun: The Atomic Age" Physicist and Astrophysicists were set loose to develop nuclear weapons and energy in the first half of the 20th century. Go beyond the headlines of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. We'll be exploring the history of nuclear weapons testing, power generation, and the modern risks and benefits of technology that either harnesses or unleashes energy hotter than the Sun!

5/9 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Beatles Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/10 2pm Back to the Moon for Good The show opens with the first era of space exploration in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We see what that era of landers and orbiters taught us about our nearest neighbor including the discovery of the Moon’s origin, composition, structure and the accessibility of raw materials on its surface.The Google Lunar XPRIZE is designed to democratize space and create new opportunities for eventual human and robotic presence on the Moon. We see the engineering and innovation steps taken by the internationally distributed teams competing to land a spacecraft on the Moon and vie for additional prizes. We highlight the human spirit of competition and collaboration as teams take on this audacious challenge. Who will win the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE? The audience is taken through a successful launch, landing and lunar surface travel. The show ends with a stunning glimpse of a plausible scenario for our future on the Moon.

5/10 7pm Dark Matter Mystery Dark Matter is a theoretical form of invisible mass, which is believed to be present in galaxies, but has never been seen or detected. You've probably heard of it before, as it makes up a large part of the physics you find in textbooks. But how can something that's never been seen have so much scientific confidence? Furthermore, why can't we see dark matter to begin with? And if we can't see it, how do we know that it is really there? And if it's not there, what are the alternative ideas? These are the questions we will be aiming to answer, as we dive into the Dark Matter mystery.

5/10 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Metal Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/16 7pm Aurorae: Dancing Lights - For millennia our ancestors looked in awe at the "dawn in the north" or Aurora Borealis. What causes this display? where does it occur? Do other planets have aurorae also? We'll take a tour from the surface of the sun out to the magnetic poles of the solar system to find out!

5/16 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Tranquility Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/17 2pm "Forward! To the Moon" Narrator Kari Byron from Crash Test World and MythBusters launches us on a journey beyond the Earth towards a sustainable future in space. NASA’s 21st century Artemis program, named after the Greek moon Goddess and twin of Apollo, is the next step in our mission to explore the universe and land the first woman and person of color on the surface of the Moon. Produced by Fiske Planetarium in collaboration with TEND Studio.

5/17 7pm Distant Worlds: Alien Life Is a beautiful planetarium film exploring one of the most enduring questions of humankind — are we alone?For millennia our ancestors watched the stars, questioning the origin and nature of what they saw. Still today we ask these questions, knowing that the Universe is a vast place filled with billions and billions of stars and planets — but yet, Earth is the only planet we know for sure to be inhabited.

5/17 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Pop Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/20 7pm Wyoming Skies: Moon, Mars, Venus Conjunction - What’s up in the sky around Wyoming: stars, constellations, planets, meteor showers, and more. Each show we highlight a new or upcoming celestial event. After the planetarium show finishes at 8pm, we are available to host informal telescope observing on the rooftop of the Physical Sciences Building at the STAR Observatory (weather permitting).

5/23 - 5/26 Closed for Memeorial Day Weekend

5/30 7pm Parker Solar Probe - a NASA spacecraft designed to study the Sun up close, entering its corona for the first time. It achieves this by using Venus flybys to gradually adjust its orbit, allowing it to approach the Sun at a distance of approximately 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers). This makes it the first spacecraft to touch the Sun's atmosphere and the fastest human-made object ever built, reaching speeds of over 430,000 miles per hour.

5/30 8:30pm Liquid Sky: R&B Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

5/31 2pm Two Small Pieces of Glass Produced to engage and appeal to audiences of all ages. The film traces the history of the telescope from Galileo's modifications to a child's spyglass — using two small pieces of glass — to the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the future of astronomy. It explores the wonder and discovery made by astronomers throughout the last 400 years.

5/31 7pm One Sky: Each short film represents the perspective of a different culture or Indigenous society from around the globe. Each film stands alone as a short story or in combination as a longer narrative – organized around themes of "Finding Patterns" and developing tools, or as we say, "To Seek Far." Films: "The Forge of Artemis", "Thunderbird", "Jai Singh’s Dream", "Celestial Canoe", "The Samurai and Stars", "Wayfinders".

5/31 8:30pm Liquid Sky: Indie Folk Enjoy a custom playlist of "out-of-this-world" music from top artists in 5.1 surround as the 4k resolution planetarium sky melts and becomes a canvas of color, patterns, and movement with our cutting-edge music visualization software and live VJ talent.

June Schedule TBA

Public Show and Tickets Information

All regular programs are approximately an hour in length. Doors open ~15 minutes ahead of the show time.

Seating is first-come first serve outside of designated ADA/wheelchair seating 

Tickets are $5 for the general public and all online sales.

Tickets $3 for UW students/staff/faculty, veterans, first responders, seniors, or children ONLY when purchased with cash in person.

Seating is free for children under 5.

Reservations or pre-purchase is not required, walk-ins are welcome.

You can purchase tickets online with credit card, reserve tickets over email or voicemail, or walk-in and purchase tickets at the start of the show.

Purchase tickets online with credit card.

You may need to disable your ad-blocker and/or enable pop-ups to complete your online ticket purchase.

Use the address associated with the billing of your card to make the reservation. Online ticket sales can occur upto the show time but be prepared to show your email receipt.

To reserve tickets or get more information contact us via email or voicemail Monday - Friday 8:00AM - 4:00PM 

email: planetarium@uwyo.edu

voicemail: 307-766-6506 (Please leave a voice message and it will forward to email, we will return your call ASAP.

If you don't leave a voicemail we won't be able to return your call.

If you have a large group or are unable to attend our public shows don't hesitate to contact us for a private show.

The University of Wyoming does not tolerate racism, discrimination, harassment or hate speech towards students, staff, faculty, or other show attendees and any ticket holder found to be violating this policy will be removed from the event.

*Friday/Saturday Evening Liquid Sky music programs may occasionally contain explicit language, please use your discretion when bringing children to music shows. The holiday music playlists are family friendly. CAUTION: Music shows contain visuals that may not be safe for those with photosensitive epilepsy or other conditions triggered by light.

Observatory Nights

Next Public Observing: Ask for a telescope tour after Wyoming Skies on even-date Tuesdays 8pm

       Please contact UW Planetarium with Ticket Questions: 307-766-6506 | planetarium@uwyo.edu