Mapping the Hidden Universe: A SDSS-V Planetarium Show
For thousands of years, humans have looked to the night sky trying to understand our place in the universe. Today, the fifth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) is building the most detailed three-dimensional map of the cosmos ever made — from individual stars in our own Milky Way to supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies.
Mapping the Hidden Universe is the first in a series of fulldome films created by Fiske Planetarium in collaboration with the SDSS-V collaboration. This introductory film takes audiences from Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, showing how three uniquely designed telescopes capture millions of spectra — the “rainbows” or chemical fingerprints of light — to reveal what stars, galaxies, and interstellar gas clouds are made of, how they form, and how they change over time.
Audiences will discover how astronomers turn starlight into science, why every object in the sky has its own unique spectrum, and how SDSS-V’s data, freely shared with the world, is helping answer some of humanity’s oldest questions about the universe.
Available in [1K, 2K, and 4K — confirm formats]. Run time: [XX] minutes.
Interested in downloading this film for your own dome or planetarium? Fill out our Fiske Productions Request form. All of Fiske’s films are available in 4K, 2K, and 1K versions (and are free!)
More films coming soon!
Mapping the Hidden Universe is the first of four films in this series. Three additional films, each focused on one of SDSS-V’s three mappers — the Milky Way Mapper, Local Volume Mapper, and Black Hole Mapper — are currently in production and will be released in the coming months.
Credits
Produced by Fiske Planetarium, University of Colorado Boulder, in collaboration with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) collaboration
