The Space Museum will be given a facelift to offer more innovative and tailor-made services to visitors, its curator Chan Ki-hung says.

Renovation work will be conducted over the coming years to upgrade the museum's environment and facilities.

The Stanley Ho Space Theatre will close from November 17 to June 30 for renovation. The $34 million works involve the installation of a new digital planetarium projector and replacing the seats with an interactive system.

With a resolution exceeding 48 million pixels, the new digital planetarium projector system boasts the highest resolution in the world, and can project full dome animations or movies. The system also allows future expansion such as upgrading to project 3D full dome images.

The new seats will be installed with a multilingual facility allowing narration in more than four languages for a show. The newly designed display unit installed on the armrest of the seat will allow viewers to select language and use the interactive features.

Exhibition halls enhanced

Renovation of the museum's exhibition halls will be conducted in 2011. The work includes improving the two halls' infrastructure, and the design, prototyping, fabrication and installation of new exhibits.

All existing exhibits in the Hall of Space Science and the Hall of Astronomy will be replaced by newly designed exhibits installed in a virtual-reality environment.

The halls' renovation will cost about $32 million and take half a year to complete.

More new items

Two new developmental projects will be completed in the coming months. They are the Space Museum Sai Kung iObservatory which will open to the public next month, and the Astropark which will be completed early next year.

The iObservatory, a three-storey building with a floor area of 270 square metres, is situated in Lady MacLehose Holiday Village, Sai Kung. It houses a 60cm Cassegrain telescope, the largest professional telescope in Hong Kong, inside a dome on the roof.

Located in Chong Hing Water Sports Centre, Sai Kung, the Astropark is the first theme park equipped with star-gazing facilities.

The Astropark has an area of about 1,200 square metres and is divided into an observation area for amateur astronomers, a naked-eye observation area for casual users and an education zone for daytime use.

Advanced facilities

Four sets of binoculars, specially designed for easy viewing of any direction in the sky, will be installed in the telescopic observation area. Ten telescope piers will be installed in the Astropark for amateur astronomers to use their own telescopes without the trouble of carrying heavy tripods.

The educational zone will house replicas of ancient Chinese astronomical instruments, such as an exact replica of the Ming Armillary Sphere and a shadow sundial with which visitors can use their own shadows to tell the time.