New science center planned for college

      Community College Southern Nevada is planning to build a $30 million 100,000-square-foot science center with a science museum and new public planetarium on its West Charleston Boulevard campus, science instructor Dale Etheridge said.
      Etheridge, who manages the 21-year-old planetarium at the Cheyenne campus, said designs for the new center are still preliminary. He said the college will ask for funding in two years at the next state legislature.
      "If everything fits into place we should have it completed in five or seven years," Etheridge said.
      Preliminary plans for the new center show a futuristic building with a raised walkway leading to the planetarium. The planetarium will be painted to resemble the earth from the outside.
      A 200-seat theater will flank the planetarium. The new theater will show large-format films about astronomy, Etheridge said.
      The new planetarium will seat 250 people and will have a dome 60 feet in diameter. It will be opened to the public daily.
      The older planetarium seats 65 and has a dome 30 feet in diameter. The Cheyenne planetarium will be used for only educational purposes, Etheridge said.
      Etheridge said the new science center will better serve Las Vegas' growing population.
      "This city is big enough for a real science museum (and planetarium)," he said. "This planetarium was okay for a city of 350,000, but we have more than 1 million people that live here now."
      Next year, the Cheyenne planetarium will undergo $29,000 in renovations that will include new carpeting and new seats. The weekend programming will eliminate its 35-millimeter film format and stick to multimedia presentations of astrological images.
      This spring, the planetarium will offer 20-minute shows of timely layouts of the night skies followed by question-and-answer periods, Etheridge said.
      In April, the planetarium will present Cowboy Astronomy with night-sky images backed by the words of Nevada cowboy poet Baxter Black.
      The planetarium, at the south end of the Cheyenne campus, will present "Light Years from Andromeda and Seasons" through January. Admission is $3.50 for adults and $2.25 for children, senior adults and students.
      The student observatory, which houses three telescopes, will have free viewing sessions after the 7:30 p.m. performances on clear nights.