Planetarium Jena, Planetarium in Jena, Germany

Planetarium Jena is a building with a white dome under which you sit and watch the sky projected above you, with projectors that display stars and planets. The interior space lets visitors recline and observe the cosmos at a grand scale.

The building opened in 1926 and was among the first of its kind in Germany. Since then, it has become an important example of how planetarium technology evolved.

The name Zeiss-Planetarium comes from Carl Zeiss of Jena, whose engineers built the projector; the restaurant added in 2004 is named Bauersfeld after Walther Bauersfeld, who designed the dome. Shows are given live by staff as well as as multimedia productions made in-house, and the 3D sound system SpatialSoundWave from the Fraunhofer IDMT in Ilmenau was the first permanent installation of its kind in a planetarium dome.

The interior is accessible for people with mobility difficulties, and there is enough space to sit comfortably and watch. Plan your time to enjoy the show at a relaxed pace and arrive early enough.

The dome is a concrete shell only six centimetres thick and 25 metres across, built by Dyckerhoff & Widmann to a design by Franz Dischinger, using a rod framework related to the geodesic domes Richard Buckminster Fuller later built. Before the permanent building existed, around 80,000 people saw trial shows under a provisional dome on the roof of the Zeiss works in 1924, which the press called the "Wunder von Jena".