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Auckland's Stardome Observatory is pleading for public support to keep the lights on at its ageing planetarium.
Although the 39-year-old institution is not quite in danger of being devoured by a financial black hole, it faces an astronomical task of trying to raise more than $2 million for new digital technology to retain the 360-degree planetarium as a viable educational tool.
The observatory is confident of meeting more than half that cost from its own resources and sponsors, but needs a capital grant of almost $1 million from Auckland City Council next year.
To help persuade the council to put the application on its draft annual plan in April, the observatory is inviting supporters to enrol at a special website so they can be counted when the time is right.
Chief executive Craig Garner said that although the planetarium had served the public well since being installed in 1997, the German manufacturer of its analogue star-projector was no longer making parts for that machine, and the lights were literally in danger of going out.
"We are regularly having to ring Germany asking how to fix it," he said.
The world's planetarium industry had moved to digital technology, so it was also becoming hard to obtain pre-recorded presentations able to be played on analogue equipment.
Instead of presenting outer space in two-dimensional pictures from a single fixed view, a battery of up to six full-dome digital projectors would give spectators the 3D feeling of being taken "to the edges of the universe".
Observatory administrator Andrew Buckingham, one of a team struggling to keep the old technology working, admitted it was in danger of being eclipsed by some home-theatre systems.
Stardome marketing manager Victoria McArthur said there would always be telescopes at the observatory, which was built in One Tree Hill Domain in 1967, but astronomy would become less accessible to many people without a planetarium to attract them.
She said 98 per cent of the observatory's 56,000 annual visitors used the planetarium, which was invaluable for introducing children to the wonders of the night sky.
Once hooked by the simulation, the observatory gave them the opportunity to look far into space for themselves through one of the world's largest publicly accessible telescopes.
Ms McArthur said there were few such observatories in the world in which a planetarium was housed with large telescopes in the same building.
The observatory's original Zeiss telescope was donated by the late Edith Winstone Blackwell on condition that it remain available to the public, but Mr Garner said most others like it around the world were locked away for the exclusive use of astronomers.
Auckland astronomers led by Dr Grant Christie used a second telescope at the observatory last year to help to discover a planet several times larger than Jupiter orbiting a distant star.
Ms McArthur said new technology could give visitors to the planetarium a sensation of being taken to that same planet.
