Planetarium of Nantes

The planetarium is located on the right bank of the Loire, atop Sainte-Anne's hill, at 8 Rue des Acadiens, in the middle of the Bellevue - Chantenay - Sainte-Anne neighborhood. It's almost face-to-face with the Fresque des Acadiens, and is also located close to the Jules Verne Museum.

The planetarium can not be visited as a museum: it mainly offers commented sessions which last about an hour, scheduled ahead of time and adapted for audiences of varying age and knowledge levels.

Under a dome 8 meters in diameter, the planetarium can accommodate 59 spectators and garners about 60,000 visitors per year, consisting of schoolchildren and the general public.

In the lobby, there are various items to help participants pass the time while they wait for a show: three large meteorites (the heaviest being 36 kg) that the public can touch; showcases exposing several fragments of various types of meteorites; models showing robots put on the soil of Mars, Venus, the Moon, Titan (moon), and on a comet; planetary globes; model rockets and satellites (such as the International Space Station, Juno, the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope); and other model rovers.

The Planetarium of Nantes weaves a network among local actors like the Laboratory of planetology of the University of Nantes, the Museum of natural history, the science and environment pole Sequoia, the Society of Astronomy of Nantes, the association "Meridienne" , and many others, all working in the field of research or scientific mediation including astronomy.

Other than its commented sessions, the Planetarium of Nantes offers other diverse activities.

• About once a month, a nightly session is held on a more specific theme.
• They have a mobile planetarium (an inflatable dome structure 5 to 6 meters in diameter and 3 meters high) designed as an introduction to astronomy for use in schools.
• Education workshops for children and adults, organised in partnership with the Astronomical Society of Nantes and l'Accoord Efferv&Sciences

In 1979, the City of Nantes decided to build a planetarium. At that time in France, there were only a few planetariums around: the Palais de la Découverte in Paris (23.5 m), one in Marseille (8 m) which would later burn down, and two in Reims and the ENAC of Toulouse (6 m). The planetarium in Nantes was to be built on the upper part of the Moisan Square, which was abandoned at this time.

At its opening to the public on June 18, 1981, the planetarium was equipped with a Carl Zeiss projector, model ZKP2—identical to those in the planetariums of Reims, Nîmes (which would open a year later), and Marseille.

Between 1999 and 2000, the City of Nantes expanded the premises with two 9 m² offices , which allowed the planetarium to expand the lobby and install some models and collections of meteorites.

In the fall of 2005, for approximately 480,000 euros, the opto-mechanical Zeiss projector was replaced by a digital type, and the City of Nantes offered its former projector to the National University of Córdoba, who opened up their own planetarium in 2017. At that time, there were only 3 planetariums in France using Evans & Sutherland's Digistar II fisheye (Vaulx-en-Velin, Pleumeur-Bodou and Toulouse), and Saint-Étienne experimenting with multi-video projectors. Nantes is the first planetarium in the world to install five video projectors (to cover the entire vault) DLP type in a medium dome.

Since the 1990s, some pioneers have been developing digital installations to replace opto-mechanical star projectors. Digital installations consist of installing video projectors in the dome, computers and software (astronomical simulator) to reconstruct the observable Universe data astronomical catalogs constructed by data from astrometric satellites, such as Hipparcos (about 120,000 positioned stars) or Gaia (spacecraft) (more than 1 million objects). This made it possible to move in a universe volume in three dimensions, in real time or to "travel" in time. If the simulator is well built, it can also travel from planets to planets and land there.

In the fall of 2013, the Nantes Planetarium closed for refurbishment work: change of video projectors, computers, and software for around 500,000 euros. These two months of closure to the public refreshed the chairs, redone the painting of the dome, and rearranged the public lobby.

As a result of the transformation of the urban community into Metropole, it became a metropolitan facility between January 2015 and January 2016.

This small municipal square of 690 m² (7,400 sq ft) located between the back of the planetarium and the Rue de l'Hermitage, has in its center a set of sculptures, including a giant sundial, made by Jean-Michel Ansel, sundial maker, entitled Structures astronomiques , representing the movement of the Earth around the Sun, eclipses of the Moon and the Sun, the retrograde movement of Mars, the sunshine of the Earth in real time, the planets scaled to each other, etc. This square is accessible either by the staircase located between Misery street and Hermitage street, or from the Acadiens street bypassing the planetarium.

• Official website
• Worldwide Planetariums Database (WPD)