A Carl Zeiss starball from Jena has been showing Malabar the sky since 1997

The most interesting object in Kozhikode is one that most visitors to the city have never seen, and that nobody can see at the moment. It is a German opto-mechanical star projector, and it has been throwing the night sky onto a 15.3-metre dome in Jaffer Khan Colony since Republic Day week in 1997.

What is actually in the dome

The operator’s own description is worth having precisely, because travel listings mangle it: a hybrid projection system comprising a nine-channel digital dome system running nine JVC projectors, together with a fully refurbished Space Flight opto-mechanical projection system from Carl Zeiss of Jena, Germany.

That is two quite different machines working the same surface. The Zeiss is the classical instrument — a mechanical starball, pierced metal and lenses, making pinpoint stars by physically projecting light through apertures. It is the reason planetarium stars look like stars rather than like pixels. The nine projectors are the modern layer, blanketing the dome in video, which is what lets a show fly its audience through Saturn’s rings instead of merely showing them a correct sky.

Running both is what the industry calls hybrid, and it is genuinely better than either alone: the Zeiss stars stay sharper than any projector can render them, while the digital layer supplies everything that moves. Note the phrase "fully refurbished", though — the Zeiss at Calicut is not the 1997 installation in original condition. It was rebuilt before the hybrid conversion.

The paperwork

The replacement is a matter of public record. A tender published in September 2024 by the National Council of Science Museums covers the supply, installation, testing and commissioning of a complete, fully integrated full-dome hybrid immersive planetarium projection system at Kozhikode. Two details are worth pulling out of it.

The first is that the replacement is specified as hybrid again, not purely digital. An opto-mechanical star capability is meant to survive the upgrade rather than be abandoned to video, which is not a foregone conclusion elsewhere in the world.

The second is that the tender package included a document listed as buyback specifications — the outgoing equipment offered to the incoming vendor as part-payment. The notice does not name the instrument, and we are not going to assert that it is the Zeiss. But "buyback" means something specific, and the machine that has been showing Malabar the stars since 1997 is on the wrong side of it.

What the notice does not carry is a contract value, and no figure should be printed for it.

What the dome was used for

This is the part no aggregator carries, and it is the best thing about the institution. The centre did not merely buy shows. It made them.

The first three came from the Birla planetarium at Hyderabad. After that the staff started developing their own — script, visuals, music, recording, synchronisation, the lot. Over seventeen years they conceptualised and produced sixteen main shows, beginning with one called Dona and the Universe.

And then the audience changed the programme. Staff noticed that after the winter vacation the dome filled with lower- and upper-primary children who were, in the centre’s own words, too young to follow any astronomical stuff discussed in a normal public show pitched at high-school level. So they built eight more shows specifically for primary groups, using cartoon slides. Beyond those, two community shows — one for Ramadan and one for Onam — and one on Indian astronomy.

A planetarium in Malabar writing its own festival programming, for its own audience, in its own language, is a considerably more interesting fact than the make of its projector. The centre records that it has run about 1,200 shows a year, and that the most it ever managed in a single day was nineteen — against a normal schedule of four, which tells you what a school-season surge looks like from the inside.

The last regular film before the blackout was an import: The Realm of Light, a history of life from the Big Bang to the modern age of man, carrying awards from dome festivals in the United States, Portugal, Germany and South Korea.