DAYTONA BEACH — Galaxies to the left, galaxies to the right. Galaxies overhead. There’s no shortage of celestial highlights culled from some of the best images ever taken in space as visitors make their way to upgraded planetarium at Daytona’s Museum of Arts and Science.

“We want the experience to begin even before you make your way into the theater, to really be immersed in space,” said MOAS’ Curator of Science Seth Mayo, who is also director of its Lohman Planetarium.

The lobby outside the planetarium’s entrance is filled with massive shots taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope and even the International Space Station with a shot of Earth that includes Florida.

“Almost every moment you look around, there’s something to learn,” he says pointing out images and rattling off names like the Sombrero Galaxy, Cosmic Reef Nebula and the popular Pillars of Creation, which were repurposed from a popular 2023 exhibit tied to James Webb. “As you walk in, people can sit down and enjoy the space, enjoy all the visuals around them before they even make their way into a show.”

And that’s just the lobby. It’s an appetizer for the main course, the upgraded planetarium with a projector more than twice the power of the museum’s previous one, and a spate of new programming that opened to the public Saturday.

“We went from a 2.5 million pixel resolution dome to a 5.7 million pixel projection in there,” Mayo said. The old system that was already aging tapped out after power outages from Hurricane Ian and Nicole in 2022. The museum had to rely on temporary, but older, projectors borrowed from Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, It has been working on what it’s calling “Planetarium 2.0” for more than a year.

The star is the new Evans and Sullivan Digistar 7 dome projection system that cost the museum $140,000.

“We can do a lot more than we could in our previous projection system,” Mayo said. “Fly around the universe, of course, but also teach concepts about the oceans, about dinosaurs, about art, science and history. It has a lot more capability now, because we want to not just be known for astronomy and space, we want the planetarium to be a multidisciplinary, multisubject matter kind of place. So you can learn anything in an immersive environment.”

To show off the system, the museum plans new themed shows each week through August, such as the “week of the sun, and then week of the Earth, and week of the moon and so on,” Mayo said.

“We’ve been operating it for some time, just learning how to use it to its greatest potential, and now … we’re just kind of highlighting all that we can do,” he said.

That includes daily shows, but also monthly special events such as the July 20 anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and an August jazz concert married with space imagery. In the fall, the museum will shift into night-sky observing opportunities run in tandem with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University each month.

“We’re trying to create one of the largest stargazing events in Florida by joining our two campuses together because Embry-Riddle has their amazing observatory and telescope, and we have the planetarium and so we can offer different experiences,” he said.

There’s also second Saturday laser shows each month, playing things like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and even the space-themed “Major Tom” from David Bowie.

“We have new shows like a Taylor Swift show, just popular music from today,” Mayo said. “And we also upgraded our laser system. So now we have beam effects and even fog in the planetarium to add a whole ‘nother layer to it.”

The themes spill over outside the planetarium, such as using the museum’s new solar scopes to safely view the sun during the day. The museum also has a small, portable, inflatable planetarium outside the main lobby for now, but something it has been able to take to other locations around the state as part of outreach programs. That also includes the use of some mockup “shuttle era spacewalking suits that we have that we can wear and kind of get kids excited about space,” Mayo said.

As far as the options for content within the dome itself, assistant curator of science and planetarium manager Christian Traverson shows off the computer powering the display, which was glowing red as he discussed its capabilities.

“So this is this our Mission Control, being cheesy about it,” he said. “We use some of the same methods that we would for astronomy. So if I’m running software that’s doing image stacking outside — pitch-black middle-of-the-night with a telescope, right? We red-light it, so I don’t lose my color, my night vision.”

Traverson said he loves to take spaceflight video and put it up on the dome as well, such as the recent SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy launches from Texas.

“If it’s a launch that’s within our hours, we’ll show it,” he said, but noted he’ll also do replays the next day.

But the sheer number of options from the Digistar system, he said, is one of the best benefits, as it shares data with planetariums around the world.

“It’s just significantly more capable as a system,” he said. “We have all of these pages that allow us to show annular and proper motion of planets. I can show the aurora of different planets like Jupiter … Constellations in the sky. I can show you any constellation under the Greek and Ptolemaic model. I can show you constellations in other sky cultures. We were never able to do that in our previous system.”

It can show meteor showers, images from around the Earth and anything from an “entire solar system Atlas,” he said.

“This actually allows us to showcase more things that actually bridge the gap and show people that there’s more than just maybe what you’ve even seen in other planetariums,” he said.

The planetarium’s role, though, isn’t just about visual spectacle. He takes the ample display capacity to tackle current issues such as the proliferation of satellites now in low-Earth orbit.

“I do mention the sheer amount of stuff we have in space, but I can also mention the things that we’re doing to fix that — reusability of spacecraft, and being able to build satellites that are better to put into a parking orbit, or deorbit, something like that,” he said. “We can be really objective about what we show and I love that because the whole point of what we do here is to communicate science.”

If you go

MOAS is located at 352 S. Nova Road in Daytona Beach. The museum is open 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m, Sunday. General admission is $19 for adults, $17 for seniors 65 and older and students, $10 for children ages 6-17, and children 5 and under are free. Planetarium shows cost an additional $7 for adults, $5 for children ages 0-17: For more information, visit moas.org.