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Tuesday 10am - 4pm Wednesday 10am - 4pm Thursday 10am - 4pm Friday 10am - 8pm Saturday 10am - 6pm Sunday 10am - 6pm

Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium

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Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium

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One of Australia's premier astronomy venues. View our community guidelines: https://bnecouncil.cc/CG General entry is free.

Brisbane's planetarium presents a wide range of entertaining public astronomy shows for all ages, as well as special live school programs. The Planetarium is open to the public from 9:00am to 4:00pm daily during Queensland school holidays. Closed on Mondays during school term and closed all public holidays. Charges apply for Cosmic Skydome shows. For ticket pricing and show schedules please visit our website at www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planetarium

Sessions start at the scheduled time and there is limited admittance to the show after theatre doors are closed. Please check the start time on your tickets prior to arrival.

05/11/2026

Our next feature is ‘H’ for ‘Hannys Voorwerp’ ✨
This is Dutch for Hanny’s Object, and it was the first observation of a cloud of ionised gas with no obvious source of the ionising radiation.

Professional-amateur collaboration in astronomy has grown over the last century with amateurs helping map the extreme edge of the Moon’s visible disk, conducting regular observations of meteor activity, and much more, night after night, whenever the sky is clear, which professionals generally cannot do.

Recent decades have seen the growth of citizen-science projects, using the collective efforts of ordinary people to study and classify objects in vast databases. We are in an era when professional observatories, on the ground and in space, produce such vast amounts of data that professionals cannot analyse it all themselves, and projects have been set up to harness amateur enthusiasm.

Galaxy Zoo is one such project, which asks people to classify galaxies according to their shapes. As part of the process, participants are encouraged to flag any objects they are not sure about, so that a professional can take a look, and Hanny’s Voorwerp was a classic example. First noticed in 2009 as a strange blob by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, this turned out to be a galaxy-sized mass of material, glowing in greenish light. It was possibly illuminated by a relatively nearby quasar, but in the 100,000 or so years it took for the light to reach Hanny’s Object and make it shine, the quasar faded from view. Since Hanny’s discovery, more “Voorwerpjes” have been identified, and they are now recognised as belonging to a class of object known as extended emission-line regions, or EELRs, first discovered in 1990. EELRs are large clouds of material glowing because of radiation from active galactic nuclei.

📷: Wikipedia

01/11/2026

Discover what’s lighting up the night sky with this month's Astro Highlights:

🪐 The only bright planet in the evening sky this month is Saturn
🌘 3 November: the waning Moon is between Mars and Jupiter in the morning sky and all are closer together than the previous month. Grab your binoculars and see them all together.
🌙 Early November: Venus is now rising an hour before the Sun, with a very thin crescent Moon visible on the 7 and 8 November
🌙 11 November: See a thin crescent Moon just above the red giant star Antares at twilight
🔴 16 November: Jupiter and Mars appear very close together for a few days mid-month, but they don’t rise until after midnight.
✨ By the end of the month, Orion returns to the evening sky low in the east, and Mars, Jupiter and the Moon make a close trio again on the 30 November, rising just before midnight.

Explore more of the universe at the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium: https://bnecouncil.cc/4i3f7ap

📷: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

30/10/2026

Our next from the Artemis II images come from Duncan, our Planetarium Program Officer, sharing one of his favourite images of this mission.

This image is immediately unusual because it shows an unfamiliar view of our own planet, appearing as a crescent. We are used to images from Google, or images from the International Space Station, showing great vistas from low-Earth orbit that don’t reveal the entirety of Earth, or images like the Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” that show the fully sunlit disk, but this is different, and immediately says that we are viewing from somewhere unusual.

Then there is the inclusion of the Moon in the frame. NASA wanted to recreate the famed “Earthrise” image from Apollo 8, and the first chance came as Earth was disappearing behind the Moon – “Earthset” – which is what we see here. Earth appears dwarfed by the Moon, which was probably 100 times closer than Earth, at that time. Only 28 humans had previously seen Earth from this perspective, and it remains novel and notable. Earth is seen going into eclipse, during which event the astronauts were utterly disconnected from Earth, unable to communicate with it until their flyby motion brought the capsule past the Moon so that Earth came into view again; so close to home, but utterly alone for 40 minutes.

The contrasts between Earth and the Moon stand out. Earth, though seen from a rare perspective, is very familiar, with clouds and ocean being the main features: a crescent version of Apollo 17’s “Blue Marble”. The Moon is immediately alien though: a barren surface, with many craters of different sizes, and an unfamiliar brown tinge. We might think of the Moon as a tiny pale white object in a blue daytime sky, or a beloved silvery feature of the night sky, but here, the Moon seems different; it could be any rocky, cratered planet or asteroid, because no distinguishing landmarks are visible. We know, from ISS images, that Earth’s sunlit atmosphere glows above the surface of the planet, before fading to black about 150 km up, but here, the Moon is seen to have no atmosphere: the surface is unimpeded by cloud or water, and there is no hazy margin before the blackness of space.

Finally, the Moon appears dull compared to Earth, reflecting only about 12% of the sunlight back to space, while our planet’s reflectance is nearer 30%. The night-sky brilliance of the Moon is by contrast with the dark sky, with our eyes adjusted for the darkness, and this image gives the lie to that impression.

📸: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

25/10/2026

Can you guess this astronomical object?

Get up close and personal with this Hubble Space Telescope image and let us know in the comments what you think it is 👇

22/10/2026

Our next feature is ‘G’ for ‘Globular cluster’ ✨

Our Sun is a solitary star, unlike most stars in the galaxy, which are members of double or multiple systems. In the past, the Sun would have been embedded in a cluster of stars, all formed around the same time from a cloud of gas and dust. Over a thousand clusters are known in our galaxy, and they are known as open clusters, which contain up to a few thousand stars. Almost all open clusters disperse over hundreds of millions of years, as our Sun’s did long ago. However, there is another type of cluster, a globular cluster, which is a different thing altogether.

Globular clusters generally contain tens of thousands to millions of stars and tend to be gathered around the centre of the galaxy and into the extended region known as the halo, whereas open clusters are mainly found in the spiral arms. Unlike open clusters, globulars do not disperse over time, and contain some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. There are fewer than 200 known globulars, several of which can be seen by eye in a dark sky, with the largest being omega Centauri, near the Southern Cross and the Pointers, containing perhaps 10 million stars.

The nearest star beyond the Sun is over 4 light-years away, but in the dense core of a large globular cluster, there might be tens of thousands of stars within a volume 1 light-year across. The night sky from such a location might be as bright as a Full-Moon night, with many stars brighter than Venus all over the sky.

There was a puzzle some decades ago over why some clusters had a higher proportion of blue stars than expected: if the clusters were 10 billion years old, or older, there should have been an excess of old red stars, as there generally is at the heart of a spiral galaxy. These stars were dubbed “blue stragglers”. One likely reason is collisions between pairs of stars in these dense clusters; after such a collision and merger, the mass of an ageing pair of stars can combine to form a single star that bears the characteristics of a more massive and apparently younger star, still in the main hydrogen-burning phase, and therefore bluer.

13/10/2026

Can planets wander through space without a parent star?
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Yes! Not all planets form and stay around stars. Astronomers estimate that more than 200 billion are floating through our galaxy.

Find out more about our galaxy at the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium: https://bnecouncil.cc/4xqbvnX

09/10/2026

Our next feature is ‘F’ for ‘Fusion’ ✨

It’s over 2,000 years since the first suggestion that stars might be objects like the Sun, rather than being gods, or oil lamps in the sky, but that still left the question: what exactly are they? One mystery was how the Sun could keep burning for so long without burning out, as a normal fire would; it must have been fire, to produce the heat that it did…?

The mystery was left unsolved until the early 20th century, when the secrets of atoms began to be uncovered by:

✨ Albert Einstein, who showed that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin, with an enormous amount of energy contained in a small amount of matter.
✨ Arthur Eddington, who proposed that stars were powered by nuclear fusion, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process.
✨ Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who concluded in her doctoral thesis that stars were made mainly of hydrogen and helium.

The immense pressure and temperature in the core of a star triggers nuclear fusion, forcing protons (hydrogen nuclei) to overcome their mutual electrical repulsion, and merge with neutrons to form helium nuclei. There are several different processes, depending on the mass of the star, but even the simplest process has several steps, and involves conversion of some protons into neutrons, the creation of some sub-atomic particles and the release of energy in the form of gamma rays.

As most of the available hydrogen becomes converted to helium, energy production slows down and the core starts to shrink under the pull of gravity; this shrinkage increases the pressure and temperature in the core until the next stage of nuclear fusion can begin, converting helium to carbon. Many stars don’t go beyond this stage, but the more massive the star, the more the pressure and temperature can build at each stage, with several more stages of fusion possible until silicon is fused to form iron.

Each stage is generally much shorter than the preceding one, with the final stage lasting only days. Iron cannot be further fused to form heavier elements, so a star reaching that stage will typically collapse under the pull of gravity when the energy supply stops, to produce a supernova explosion.

Fun fact! Every second the Sun loses over 4 million tonnes of mass through the fusion processes.

📷: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

01/10/2026

Step outside and discover what’s happening in our night sky this month:

🪐 Saturn is now visible all night, rising at sunset and is the brightest object low in east/northeast sky throughout the month.
🪐 During the first two weeks of the month, Mercury and Venus are low in the west in evening twilight.
🪐 6 October: The Moon appears between Mars and Jupiter in the morning sky.
🪐 10-13 October: Mars passes through the Beehive cluster in the morning sky.
🪐 12 October: The Moon appears between Venus and Mercury in the evening sky.

Continue your journey through the galaxy at the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium and chat with our experts: https://bnecouncil.cc/3V05yQr

📷: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

29/09/2026

Ever wondered what your name looks like in Landsat imagery of Earth or created out of galaxies?

NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration has created an interactive webpage using Earth-observing satellite images from an extensive record that spans more than 50 years, allowing people to discover locations around the world that replicate letters in nature. Similarly, with millions of galaxies out there, Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Galaxy Zoo categorised them into the letters of the alphabet they resemble.

Discover your name written in the patterns of Earth’s landscape: https://bnecouncil.cc/4cjm9o0

25/09/2026

Embark on a journey through the galaxy at the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium 🌏✨ Discover immersive shows in the Cosmic Skydome, out of this world interactive displays and exhibits, and so much more these school holidays! Find out more and explore space like never before: https://bnecouncil.cc/4ynUkDO

Address

Brisbane Botanic Gardens, 152 Mt Coot-tha Road, Toowong
Brisbane, QLD
4066

Opening Hours

Tuesday	10am - 4pm
Wednesday	10am - 4pm
Thursday	10am - 4pm
Friday	10am - 8pm
Saturday	10am - 6pm
Sunday	10am - 6pm

Telephone

+61734038888

Website

https://bnecouncil.cc/planetarium

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