Astronomical Nuggets in Las Vegas
January 2025 :
It’s said "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Not always. We were in Las Vegas specifically for two spheres: First, The Sphere, the giant ball in the middle of the Las Vegas strip. As there is an assemblage of planetarium materials within its structure, it was a must to see. The program was slated to start at 7:00 P.M., but that was actually the time the doors opened, and seating for the thousands of patrons began.
The program, “Postcard from Earth,” was quite interesting, based on the history of our planet, and the consequences that are occurring as humans take too much advantage of its resources. The only problem happened during the program, when a very slight portion of the screen’s pixels apparently burned out.
A trick if you’d like to visit the Sphere is to reserve a room at the Palazzo, and ask for a view facing it. The outside changes are every bit as fascinating as the indoor program: geometric patterns, the Sun, a yellow emoji face drinking a cup of coffee, even the Moon, with all its phases. Also, as the Sphere is a part of the neighbor Venetian, and Palazzo is attached to that, it’s an easy indoor walk.
Of course, the main reason to leave the Las Vegas strip is to travel just a few miles to Southern Nevada’s only public planetarium, named after long-term director Dale Etheridge, one of the founders of the Pacific Planetarium Association. Lisa Goodman, the present coordinator, is thrilled to have astronomy lovers visit the 66-seat, Digistar facility.
For the past couple years, the planetarium has been showing, among many other programs, the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary show. As someone who worked the original Pink Floyd laser show in the 1980s, I was anxious to see the latest, and grandest “Dark Side of the Moon” presentation, especially as it was leaving planetariums everywhere the end of the year. Lisa was anxious to ask our opinion of the show, and the consensus was the program was so incredible that the 45 minutes virtually disappeared.
In addition to the terrific programming in the planetarium, there is also an amazing amount of NASA memorabilia, including a touchable SST tire. What we thought would be a one-hour timeframe lasted almost four hours, and we could have been there longer.
Although most people travel to Las Vegas in attempts to go home millionaires, there is much to see besides the thousands of machines, and, to us, the Sphere and the Dale Etheridge Planetarium made a much nicer, and more interesting, trip.
Las Vegas Sphere shows an image of the Sun at dawn.
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