Family visit to the Beisbroek Planetarium

Yesterday the Beisbroek Planetarium played both the Planetarium shows that they used my music in on the same day. So we decided to go to Brugge in Belgium yesterday with the family to go and see the shows for the first time. The first obstacle though was getting there. The roads were very slippery because of icing so we decide to leave early. But then it is still a problem to actually find it. The planetarium is way out of the city in the forest, so should you ever decide to go there, make sure you prepare your trip well. But we found it after all :)

It is about a 3 hours drive from our house and it didn't take us much more in the end. The circumstances were not so bad as they predicted actually. So we arrived too early at the planetarium and it was still closed and the nature museum that is in the same building was closed too. But luckily right next door there is a nice restaurant were we had lunch and some drinks. The planetarium is in a nice park as well so the kids played outside as well. Half an hour before the show we decided to try if someone was there and they were and also were expecting us :)

There was a nice lady named Karen that welcomed us and took us up to the big telescope first. It is right in the dome on top of the tower. Quite awesome to see the observatory too. She opened up the dome and we could look through the telescope. The only thing to see was the Sun because it was in the middle of the day. We must go back there sometime at night for sure. She explained a lot to us about the telescope and how they take deep sky pictures with another telescope that is right next to it. And then we went down into the planetarium.

It was bigger than I expected by the way, because everyone told be it was very small, but they can take quite some people in there. In the picture on the right you can see the special Zeiss projector that they use to project all the stars and planets on the dome. Next to this special projector there are two very big video projectors that can project computer images on top of that. It was awesome to see both shows finally and hear my own music playing under them :) You have no idea how good that feels :) Well I hope to work more with them in the future since they are very friendly people and you can tell that they really like what they are doing there. I an highly recommend a visit there whenever you are in Brugge in Belgium which is a very nice city as well to visit as a tourist. And that is exactly what we did afterwards. We had a very nice dinner in Brugge and then drove back home.