About The Planetarium
The CCNY Planetarium is one of three found on the island in Manhattan. (The AMNH and The Lower East Side Girls Club have the other two.) It first opened around 1973 when the Marshak Science Building was constructed on the North Campus of City College. For decades, it served the neighboring communities in Upper Harlem. In the last few years, we’ve been trying to bring this beautiful room back to life with some technological upgrades and more exciting content and events.
We love to host shows for nearby k-12 schools, CCNY students, and the wider NYC audience. Our favorites are our live space tours in which we use our universe simulator to fly all over the cosmos. Tours can start with a fly over of our Hamilton Heights neighborhood, then visit the Moon or Mars, and finally leave the solar system system all together and visit newly discovered exoplanet systems or intergalactic space. We are also interested in more artistic and interdisciplinary uses of the immersive space. If you are too and have some ideas - reach out!
Like many planetariums around the world, we had to pause our live shows starting in March 2020. We hope to be able to open our doors wide in the very near future.
Check back soon when we have thing underway. In the meantime, you can send us a note at planetarium@ccny.cuny.edu, or do the social media things below.
Technical Details
- Installed: 1973-74
- Seats: 58
- Dome: 30 ft diameter
- Projection Systems:
- Opto-mechanical: Spitz 512A (original)
- Digital Projection: Spherical Mirror (Homebuilt, 2018)
- Software in use:
- Openspace
- Stellarium
- Quartz Composer
- VLC