This is great news for the Goto family. The newest model, GOTO ORPHEUS, was recently installed in the Kochi MIRAI Science Center. Our founder, Seizo Goto was born and raised in Kochi prefecture. When he was 19 years old, he looked at Comet Halley and decided to spread knowledge of astronomy in Japan. Sixteen years later, he founded the company now known as GOTO INC.

Kochi MIRAI Science Center was built as part of new library complex called “OTEPIA” which is a new 5-story building with a planetarium on the top floor.

The delivered system is an ORPHEUS HYBRID Planetarium system which consists of a GOTO ORPHEUS opto-mechanical planetarium projector and GOTO VIRTUARIUM X fulldome digital projection system with GOTO hybrid control console.

ORPHEUS HYBRID Details

The new ORPHEUS opto-mechanical planetarium projector is much smaller than former GOTO projectors, projecting 9,500 stars from a starball only 48cm (19”) in diameter to fill the 12 meter (40’) Kochi dome beautifully. Some 299 of these stars show the correct color temperature to give new realism to the sky. The sun, moon, and planets are also projected from the main body, with literally all projections illuminated by long-life LEDs. The Milky Way of the ORPHEUS is made up of 8 million micro-stars, showing beautiful and subtle dust lanes within our Galaxy, as well as 56 distinct nebulae and star clusters.

The moon projector of the ORPHEUS uses an embedded, LED-powered, HD video projector. Unlike all previous opto-mechanical planetariums in the world, which use mechanical devices to create basic moon phases, ORPHEUS can project not only the thinnest of crescent moons, but can also show the eerie “blood red” color of a lunar eclipse, or a golden Harvest Moon, and even earthshine on the darkened portion of the moon’s face.

The most dramatic new feature of the ORPHEUS is its ability to turn stars on or off according to their brightness. Stars dimmer than magnitude 3.5 can be switched in groups of 1/2 magnitude each. So the operator can perfectly simulate the sky as seen through crystal clear mountaintop skies, or from a humid seaside location, a small village, or a giant city. After seeing the drastic difference in stellar visibility from different sites, audiences will hopefully come to appreciate a pristine night sky, and help to minimize light pollution in their skies.

While the ORPHEUS projector is truly remarkable, joining it with a synchronized fulldome projection system creates a stunning result. Kochi’s VIRTUARIUM X system uses two Sony 4K video projectors utilizing laser phosphor illumination rather than traditional lamps with short lifetimes. The vivid colors emitted from the GOTO INC lenses are driven by a powerful array of graphics computers and VIRTUARIUM X software. GOTO INC was in fact the first company ever to project color, realtime-rendered video which covered a complete dome in 1996. Since that time, our software has become amazingly sophisticated in its ability to show realistic and fantastic, animated scenes.

For more detailes；
GOTO HYBRID planetarium ORPHEUS