Close up image of four people shown from a back/side profile as they look up to watch a projection of the Milky Way in a planetarium dome

Planetarium

The 55-foot digital dome BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Planetarium takes guests on journeys to the deepest reaches of space and beyond.

Museum Hours

Open today from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Plan Your Visit

Explore the Universe and Beyond

Guests and students will be amazed by exciting astronomy shows, entertaining programs focused on art, history or natural history and even laser shows. The planetarium uses state-of-the-art Christie projectors with laser technology to produce stunning 4K visuals across the dome. Plus, a digital sky system that enables the development of educational content beyond astronomy, from earth science and physics to biology, chemistry and art.  

Presenting educational and entertaining experiences for guests and students, the 145-seat dome theater provides a totally immersive environment that surrounds viewers with multi-media images and sound.  

BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.


Logo BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina

Current Shows

Click on each show to learn more, see showtimes and purchase tickets online.

Now Showing

A fury is building on the surface of the Sun: high-velocity jets, a fiery tsunami wave 100,000 km high, rising loops of electrified gas...

Additional Ticket Required
Included with Admission
Suitable for All Ages
Wheelchair Accessible

Travel through the night sky and take a tour of the constellations, planets and other celestial objects that can be seen overhead from right here in...

Additional Ticket Required
Assistive Listening Device
Suitable for All Ages
Wheelchair Accessible

Take a 360 Virtual Tour of the Night-Sky

Hey everyone Liz Kliemak here, Planetarium Manager at the South Carolina State Museum. Before we get started I do want to mention that this is a 360 video, so at any time feel free to take your mouse and just drag the image around. You can look up, down and all around. Well summer is well underway and that means night after night we can see more and more of the summer evening sky. Now spring is my favorite season, but summer brings my favorite sky. So let's go check out what the sky looks like sometime in mid July around 10 p.m. If we look high up in the southeast, there is a very large triangle in the sky. Now normally I would poke fun at a pattern of stars shaped like a triangle, because it's not very imaginative. Seriously, how many triangles can you make up in the sky? All you need are three stars. There are zillions of them, they're everywhere, but I will concede that this particular triangle is rather special and i'll tell you why. So first of all it's made of three very bright stars: Vega, Deneb and Altair. And so many people notice this specific triangle, that it's been given a name, the summer triangle and it's talked about as if it's an official constellation, when it's actually an example of something called an asterism. You can kind of think of that as an unofficial constellation or a pattern of stars that's just really popular and gets talked about a lot. But each of those stars that I pointed out is part of an official constellation.

So if we start with Vega here. Vega, together with some dim stars next to it forms a little harp called Lyra. Then over here we have Deneb, which is at the tail end of a cross-shaped constellation called Cygnus the swan. Imagine a bird soaring overhead, with its wings spread wide. Now at the other end of the bird, the head of the bird, there's a star that is called Albireo and it's kind of in the center of the triangle and the neat thing about Albireo is it looks like it's one star when it's actually two. There are two stars there orbiting around and around each other in what's called a binary star system. But those stars are so far away that by the time their light reaches us, their light kind of combines and we see it as one star.

Then last but not least we have Altair which is part of Aquila the eagle. So perhaps you can imagine another bird soaring overhead with its wings spread wide but more often than not people tell me they see a stingray or a manta ray. So I have to say I see that now more than anything else. But this is one of my most favorite parts of the sky because I love stars. I love birds and I love making music. And here we have birds and a musical instrument made of stars, so what could be more perfect. Now I can't play the harp but there's no piano or clarinet constellation so I’ll take it. Now if you're lucky enough to have access to really clear dark skies, you might notice a hazy band arching across the sky from horizon to horizon and it just so happens to cut through our giant triangle here such that our swan seems to be soaring over a river of star stuff and that's actually one of the spiral arms of our own galaxy that we live in called the Milky Way and if you're not so lucky and don't have access to really clear dark skies and you want to look for the Milky Way you can actually use the summer triangle as a guide because the Milky Way cuts right through the center of it. So in this way you can use the summer triangle as a kind of landmark in the sky to help you find some other things. Well I hope you enjoyed this tour of a triangle, so to speak, especially in this special format and I hope to see you in person someday at the South Carolina State Museum's Planetarium where we use our digital dome theater to recreate what it's like to be under the night sky and to take you to really cool places to and through the cosmos. At any rate, thank you so much for joining me here today. And as always take care of yourselves and each other and i hope to see you again in some format soon.