The Eugene Science Center is getting some new equipment after successfully matching a challenge grant for an updated planetarium.
Over the past year the center began fundraising for new equipment when the Richard P. Haugland Fund set a sixty thousand dollar challenge grant in April.
The donations will allow the Center to upgrade their digital projection system with the most recent software and computers, as well as a high-definition, laser-sourced two projector system. Their previous projector was over a decade old and died last spring.
Peggy Whalen from the center says the upgrades will greatly expand their services.
“We’ll be able to do digital art in there, we’ll be able to do full dome movies, we’ll be able to have astronomy experiences," Whalen said. "You can actually run this projector with an Xbox remote. So we can actually hand an Xbox remote to a kid on a field trip and say ‘where do you want to go, you want to go to Mars?’ and they could actually fly through space.”
The Science Center hopes to have the upgraded planetarium opened in late summer 2018.