Venue: Armagh Planetarium
Town: Armagh, GB

Armagh Planetarium is a planetarium in Armagh, Northern Ireland. It is located close to the city centre and neighbouring Armagh Observatory in approximately fourteen acres of landscaped grounds known as the Armagh Astropark. Armagh Planetarium was established by the seventh director of Armagh Observatory, Dr. Eric Mervyn Lindsay, who, after twenty-five years of effort, secured funding from local councils and the Ministry of Commerce of Northern Ireland in 1965. In the same year, Patrick Moore was appointed as director of the planetarium to oversee its construction. The planetarium cost £120,000 to build (included in this was £12,000 for the planetarium's first projector) and was officially opened on 1 May 1968, although it had been open to the public for some months before that. Since then it has undergone a number of alterations: the main building was extended in 1974 to incorporate the Lindsay Hall of astronomy, and a dome was created to house a 16 in (410 mm) reflecting telescope for public use, currently the largest public telescope in Ireland. In addition, in 1994 a new exhibition hall, the Eartharium, was added due to increased interest in Earth Science. The Armagh Astropark, which opened in 1994, is a scale model of the Solar System and the universe contained in the grounds of the Armagh Observatory, with scale-sized stainless steel models of the Sun and planets. The planetarium, which was founded in 1968, it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018. Under the directorship of Terence Murtagh in the 1970s, Armagh Planetarium introduced several new technologies. Murtagh recognised the possibility of exploiting the new technology of video projectors to provide the show's special effects, eliminating the need for dozens of slide projectors. Video tape recorders were new and rare at this time and this research was ambitious with many technical hurdles standing in the way. Off-the-shelf video projectors had to be optically and electronically modified to present natu