Getting It Done – Planetarium Upgrade at San Diego City College

I’m a professor at San Diego City College, a community college in downtown San Diego. Over a decade ago, thanks to a bond measure supported by the generous voters of San Diego, our college built a desperately needed science building. Here is coverage by our student newspaper at the time the building was opened (Spring 2014).

The past

This building gave our students the quality science labs and lecture spaces they deserved. And one of those spaces was a Spitz Inc SciDomeHD planetarium! We used it for all of our on-campus astronomy lecture courses, as well as for community outreach events and free field trips for our local K-12 schools. 

By holding our astronomy classes in the planetarium, we saw improvements in success and retention rates, as well as gains in topics such as the seasons, phases of the moon, and motions on the sky. But as you might imagine, after over a decade of use, our planetarium needed an upgrade. 

The present

Our college was the recipient of a US Department of Education Title III Hispanic-Serving Institution STEM Grant.  Under the name “Yo Soy STEM”, this grant provides opportunities for our students to receive tutoring, work experience, and transfer support. For faculty, it provides professional development opportunities to learn how to integrate culturally responsive pedagogy into STEM and Chicano/a Studies courses. Astronomy was one of the disciplines chosen to participate in the grant, and another astro professor and I worked with our Chicano/a Studies colleagues to make changes to all our sections. Our students outperformed those in the untreated astro sections, which directly led to our ability to utilize some of the remaining funds towards a planetarium upgrade as the grant enters its final year.

Many thanks to Dean Lety Lopez and Dean Claudia Diaz Carrasco for their endless advocacy and support in getting this done. It turned into a bit of a race against time, so that the money could be encumbered before possible rescinding of funds in our current political climate. This grant was spared. Other grants, such as City’s AANAPISI grant, were cut (resulting in a loss of $800k at our college). We got lucky, and that makes me angry, because institutions shouldn’t have to worry that these highly competitive grants can be taken away at any time. 

And onward

In October 2025, Cosm installed a new system featuring Digistar 2025 software. Faculty and staff had a weekend of training, we taught with the new system for the rest of the semester, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we can do. A few highlights:

We can visualize the early universe:

Not only can we go to Mars, but we can clearly see the Happy Face crater (Galle):

We can finally positively answer “can you show us a black hole?” with this amazing simulation:

The new projectors are brighter, the new software is more powerful, and the students are even more engaged. This investment will pay off for our campus and surrounding community for years to come.

Interested in planetarium use in educational settings? Here’s a previous post.

Also, check out our Sky Tonight planetarium shows at the Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park.

Wishing you clear skies!