Michigan's biggest planetarium has hidden under a Flint dome since 1958

There’s a dome on Flint’s east side that has been showing people the stars since 1958, and it’s still the biggest planetarium in Michigan. The Robert T. Longway Planetarium opened on June 26 of that year, named for a community leader who helped pull the whole Flint Cultural Center campus together. From the outside it’s a shallow saucer of perforated aluminum; from the inside it’s a sky.

The structure underneath is the clever part. The dome rides on a geodesic super-structure — the same lightweight triangle-frame idea that made Buckminster Fuller famous — measuring 88 feet across and 40 feet tall, with the projection dome inside spanning 60 feet. When it opened it sat 292 people in rows tilted back toward the ceiling, the better to stare straight up while a star projector wheeled the night sky overhead. Generations of Genesee County schoolkids took their first real look at the constellations lying back in those seats.

It got a serious overhaul in 2015, trading the old crowd of seats for 129 deeper, reclining ones and swapping the analog star machine for digital projection that can fly the audience out past Saturn and back. The planetarium shares a building and a name with the Sloan Museum of Discovery, so a trip there pairs the stars with a hall full of Flint-built Buicks. But the dome is the draw — a piece of 1950s space-age optimism, still pointed at the heavens on the same lawn where it landed.