| Sri Lanka Planetarium | |
| Native Name: | ශ්රී ලංකා ග්රහලෝකාගාරය |
| Location: | Prof. Stanley Wijesundaran Mawatha, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka. |
| Director: | K. Arunu Perera[1] |
Sri Lanka Planetarium (Sinhala; Sinhalese: ශ්රී ලංකා ග්රහලෝකාගාරය) is a public planetarium located in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is the first and only planetarium in the country and maintained as an institute under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Research.[2]
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 high and in diameter.
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 diameter dome above a 570-seat auditorium.[8] The universal projector is a product of Carl Zeiss AG East Germany.[9]