Sri Lanka Planetarium

Sri Lanka Planetarium (

The Planetarium was established on 1 February 1965 by the State Engineering Corporation as a special feature for the Ceylon industrial exhibition held in Colombo same year.[3]^[4] The planetarium was designed by the chief engineer from the State Engineering Corporation of Ceylon, A. N. S. Kulasinghe, and was constructed by engineers from Germany.^[5] The building takes elements from the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (Sir Frederick Gibberd - 1960) and the Cathedral of Brasília (Oscar Niemeyer - 1960).^[6] The building has a reinforced concrete floor and a pre-stressed concrete folded plate roof, which was pre-cast on-site.^[6] The building was funded by the German Democratic Republic as a gift to Ceylon. The planetarium is 21.33 m (70.0 ft) high and 37.8 m (124 ft) in diameter.^{[citation needed]}

The building was refurbished in 2014 at a cost of Rs 200 million and re-opened to the public on 9 December.^[7]

The planetarium has a digital fully-spherical projector stationed at the centre of the building, which projects an artificial sky on the 23 m (75 ft) diameter dome above a 570-seat auditorium.^[8] The universal projector is a product of Carl Zeiss AG East Germany.^[9]

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