A Portal to the Stars in the Heart of a... Shopping Mall?

2025-05-29 / Kat Hunt / Portable Planetarium

The unique and inspiring story of Charleston's public, portable planetarium.

There are few places where you can pick up lunch in a food court, browse for shoes, and travel through the solar system in the same afternoon. In West Ashley, a community just outside the historic city of Charleston, SC, you can do just that. Tucked inside one wing of the Citadel Mall lives one of the most unexpected portals to the cosmos in the Southeast.

The Charleston Planetarium may not be where you’d expect it—because planetariums, as a rule, don’t tend to occupy former storefronts. That’s part of the magic here. Born from a vision to bring an accessible astronomical experience to a city notably without one, this planetarium is more than a dome and a projector; it’s a grassroots solution to a regional gap in science education. Before this, Charleston’s closest planetariums were in Columbia, SC, and Florence, SC, each well over an hour away.

The decision to open in a mall was both strategic and community-oriented. A mall, the founders reasoned, already had a captive audience. People walk by, they peek in; sometimes they might stay for a show. The chosen location—West Ashley’s Citadel Mall—was picked not just for its foot traffic, but as a hopeful nudge toward revitalizing the surrounding area. Their presence here is not accidental; it’s a bold act of community investment.

Like all big ideas, this one came with its share of wrinkles. The ceiling had to be modified for example, to accommodate the zenith of the dome. Fire codes—somewhat misunderstood at first—delayed opening. Sound became an unexpected challenge as well, with the hum of the mall and nearby playground often competing with celestial narration. Yet with careful speaker placement, trial and error, and even a bit of creative signage, the team adapted. More improvements are planned even now such as acoustic insulation and carpeting — subtle tweaks that will make a meaningful difference.

The community—school groups included—have not been deterred by the fact that the planetarium is in a mall. Through creative selection and use of the space, it actually has worked out quite well. The entrance to the science center is close to a main access point in the mall. The staff have cleverly divided the space allocating the back part of the “store” for hands-on school group activities. The front of the “store” houses a gift shop and interactive exhibits accessible to the public regardless of ticket purchase. The public show schedule is designed not to overlap with school programming, and private events—offered at a flat hourly rate—bring in birthday parties, scout groups, and curious families alike.

Some of the charm lies in the unexpected. Much of the facility’s current furniture, for instance, came from the set of The Righteous Gemstones, filmed nearby. When production wrapped, the set pieces generously donated, found a second life in this little corner of the cosmos.

As the centerpiece of the space, the 7 meter/23 ft diameter inflatable dome, coupled with a Digitarium Mu system, offers a level of fidelity that few would expect in such a setting. Although portable, the Charleston Planetarium dome is large enough to accommodate audience sizes comparable to those found in small fixed theaters in other science centers. The resolution and brightness of the fisheye projection system produce visuals with the same clarity and color of a similar single-projector system in a permanent dome. The software, Nightshade G3 Starter, chosen as a mere entry point into planetariums for the organization, is the first tier of the exact same software that Digitalis installs in larger-scale 4k systems.

Once inside, many visitors forget that the dome is inflatable at all. The visuals erase the outer shell. A conscious choice was also made to offer seating, even though it reduces capacity, to provide comfort to audiences of all ages. The team has elevated the projector on a custom table to keep the sight lines clear.

There’s ambition and resilience behind the Charleston Planetarium Society, the parent organization to the Charleston Planetarium. In the earliest iterations of the project, it became clear that the cost of a permanent domed theater was prohibitive to launch. In an effort to bring the vision to life, a quality portable gave the organization a secure place to start. This is only the starting point of the Charleston Planetarium.

After rapidly demonstrating sustainability and making a profit almost immediately after opening its doors, the organization is already actively seeking funding for more robust tools—features that would bring even more interactivity and customization to their programming including upgrading to the fullest version of Nightshade G3. They are also hoping to expand their public exhibits to include more regionally relevant features such as the stars of The Underground Railroad and the South Carolina Moon.

The team hopes to one day build a freestanding Air and Space Museum, with a fixed dome theater as its centerpiece. In that vision, the current dome would then become a tool for outreach rather than the primary feature. With a prominent Boeing manufacturing hub in the area, such a facility would not only reinforce science education in the community, but career readiness and industry as well.

Charleston, with its rich tradition and thriving culture, deserves a planetarium. Not just for tourists or school groups, but for residents—especially the ones who’ve never seen Saturn’s rings projected across an immersive screen. For now, this unlikely little science center in a shopping mall is a beacon of possibility, a lesson that science doesn’t always wait for the perfect setting. Sometimes, it moves in where there’s room and begins its trajectory there.