A Registrar's Night Under the Stars
Our Registrar’s experience of the Planetarium
At Synergy 2025, the undisputed highlight of the tech fest wasn’t a robot or a software demo, it was a dome built entirely out of cardboard, by hand, by students. The ECLIPSE Astronomy Club’s planetarium stopped people in their tracks, and it moved at least one visitor to write about it.
That visitor was IIIT Bangalore’s own Registrar, who brings a perspective few others could: decades of astro-navigation in the Indian Navy, where the stars weren’t a hobby but a lifeline.
What He Saw
The dome, an eight-foot-high geodesic structure built from precisely cut and numbered cardboard triangles, hosted two fully produced astronomy shows. Soft bedding on the floor let eight visitors at a time lie back and look up at a projected night sky wrapping seamlessly around them. The projection system itself was a feat of resourcefulness: a convex traffic mirror reflecting visuals from a standard digital projector onto the curved inner surface, turning an ordinary device into something planetarium-grade.
The shows, Wonders of the Solar System and Knights of the Winter Sky, were scripted, recorded, and edited entirely by club members with human voiceover chosen deliberately over AI narration, for warmth.
Why It Resonated
For the Registrar, watching Orion and Cassiopeia glow overhead brought back memories of being set adrift at sea on a moonless night during naval training no compass, no instruments, only the stars. That same sky, now recreated by a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students inside a cardboard dome, carried the same sense of wonder.
His piece traces the club’s origins too: informal terrace gatherings in 2022, a handful of students speaking a language of constellation names that sounded like Greek and Latin to everyone else, slowly growing into a club with a 10-inch Dobsonian telescope and now, a planetarium.
Read the full article by the Registrar of IIIT Bangalore. It’s worth every word.
