The Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium is located Within the grounds of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens in the suburb of Toowong, 5 kilometres from the city's business city centre. It was officially opened on 24 May 1978 and named in honour of Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825, a renowned astronomer and explorer of the southern sky.
Sir Thomas Brisbane has been called "the creator of the of systematised science in Australia".
When in 1821 he became governor of New South Wales, he established an astronomical observatory at Parramatta, where he with two assistants to make observations. This led to the publication of the Brisbane catalogue of stars, which included a list of 7,385 stars that had not been mapped a map of the southern sky. A copy of this catalogue is kept in the Planetarium today. Now, after Thomas Brisbane returned to England, the observatory, without official support, was closed in 1847. During his short stay in Australia, Governor Brisbane made a number of significant discoveries in the skies of the southern hemisphere, for which today's Planetarium and a crater on the moon have been named after him.
In the Planetarium you can see many of the latest gadgets for studying distant stars, including a 12.5 metre high hemisphere with a newly improved digital projection system on the dome, an observatory with a permanent 15-centimetre Zeiss refractor and the Schmidt-Kassegren telescope; and the huge photo displays and models in the foyer and gallery, including a photo of the 1969 "moon landing," a mock-up of the space space shuttle, evidence of the Mars expedition, and a news feed from the Institute for Space Telescope Institute.
The Planetarium hosts regular lectures for visitors and school groups, collaborative observatories, and sometimes nightly vigils.
In the Planetarium gift shop you can buy books on astronomy and space exploration (both for adults and children), planispheres (star charts) for southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, models of the solar system and space shuttles.
