Planetarium Opens in New Jersey, Ushering in a New Kind of Star Wars.

JERSEY CITY — Bigger is better when it comes to planetariums — a bigger dome to make the audience ooh and ahh, more pixels to make the stars and planets sharper, more colors to make them more realistic, more windows on intriguing but distant nebulas, more images of Earth as a shimmering jewel against the dark drape of space.

This is especially true when the planetarium in question is in New Jersey, a state that perpetually has a chip on its shoulder. That may or may not explain the debut of the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth largest in the world. It opens this week in Jersey City.

The top scientist responsible for it, Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive officer of the Liberty Science Center, boasted that it was so large that the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the starry destination for generations of middle-school field trippers, would fit inside with room to spare.

He also noted that it sits at the edge of a park 370 acres larger than Central Park, before adding dryly, “I’m not fixated on size.”'>>>

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