The Lund University Planetarium runs the software Dark Matter from Sky-Skan. With this software we are able to simulate and visualize the known universe.

Included in this simulation is a large amount of data from both Earth- and Spacebased telescopes, missions and surveys.

Consider the following example: When you gaze upon the starry night sky in the Planetarium remember that you are not looking at an image of how the night sky looks above Lund. You are looking at the Hipparcos catalogue of nearby stars. This means that astronomers have studied every single star you see (and tens of thousands more that the Planetarium is currently not showing). The planetarium not only shows you a beautiful night sky, it has information about brightness, temperature, type, distance and movement for every single one of them.

Just as the Moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun, every single star out there (including the Sun) moves on its own orbit within the Milky Way galaxy. The Hipparcos mission carefully mapped these movements so not only can the Planetarium show you how the night sky looks right now; it can simulate how the night sky looked in the distant past and predict how it will look in the distant future.

At the planetarium we show you real scientific data. The craters on Mercury, hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our solar system, the rings around Saturn and much more.