Qualla: Galileo Galilei Planetarium

Galileo Galilei Planetarium: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fernandopascullo, CC BY 3.0. From across the lake in Parque Tres de Febrero, it looks for all the world like a flying saucer that touched down on the grass and decided to stay. The Galileo Galilei Planetarium is a great concrete dome balanced on three angled legs, a piece of 1960s futurism that the people of Buenos Aires simply call the Planetario. The resemblance to a spacecraft is no accident, and the story behind it is stranger than the building looks. When the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury visited in 1997, he came to a place that may, if a beloved local legend is true, have one of his own books hidden inside its structure. Beneath the dome, on a given night, the southern sky wheels overhead in artificial darkness, and a small grey stone in the museum has actually been to the Moon.

Image: Fernandopascullo | CC BY 3.0

Galileo Galilei Planetarium: A Saucer Comes to Palermo

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gustavo Márquez Villegas from Caracas, Venezuela, CC BY 2.0. The idea was born in 1958, from an agreement between the Socialist councilman Jose Luis Pena and the city's Secretary of Culture, Dr. Aldo Cocca. Construction began in 1962 under the architect Enrique Jan, and the building was inaugurated on 20 December 1966. The very first show ...

Image: Gustavo Márquez Villegas from Caracas, Venezuela | CC BY 2.0

Galileo Galilei Planetarium: The Book in the Legs

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanley Wood, CC BY 2.0. Here the building's true legend lives. The architect, Enrique Jan, owned a first edition of Ray Bradbury's 1950 story collection The Martian Chronicles, and Bradbury himself liked to claim that every first edition of that book carried special protective powers. According to the t...

Image: Stanley Wood | CC BY 2.0

Galileo Galilei Planetarium: Under the Dome

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, CC BY 2.0. Inside, the building is all about the sky. It has five floors and six staircases, and at its heart a circular room twenty meters across, seating 360 people beneath a hemispherical dome lined with reflective aluminum. For decades the show was produced by an extraordinary machine a...

Image: Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina | CC BY 2.0

Galileo Galilei Planetarium: Pieces of the Sky on the Ground

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Fajro assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The planetarium does not only project the heavens; it keeps fragments of them. Its prize is a piece of lunar rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo 11 mission and given to the planetarium by President Richard Nixon, a small grey relic of the first human steps on another world. ...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Fajro assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0