To respond to the nostalgia factor: Back in the early 90s my friends and I used to go to the Laserium in San Francisco all the time. Probably more than 50 times in total. They had three different Pink Floyd shows (DSotM, The Wall, and a general Floyd show), and a Rush show they would rotate through.
Like others have said, they still exist here and there but frankly your typical planetarium laser show is pretty quaint compared to the state of the art laser shows happening at big events and clubs these days. Fast forward to1:50 or so.
They used to have the McLaughlin Planetarium at the Royal Ontario Museum. I saw Laser Beatles and Laser Pink Floyd among others, they were great. Unfortunately they closed the Planetarium 30 years ago, although the building is still there and unused.
Yep. Can’t recall if they used the Vanderbilt Planetarium, and even in 1981, I was kind of jaded at mostly green lasers. The Pink Floyd and other psychedlia was cool, yet Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” *laser-shaped hearts!" was not cool.
And in Springfield, Massachusetts at the Science Museum. (Last I checked, they were featuring the songs of Taylor Swift.)
I saw DSotM at Griffith Park Observatory in LA. We, being science and engineer types, went early for the conventional planetarium show (just like Rebel Without a Cause...) so we got good seats for the laser show.
Alas, they appear to no longer do them at the Observatory.
The Planetarium in St. Louis is closed for a major upgrade, and they’re promising a program series that “fuses music, laser artwork, immersive lighting and 3D-atmospheric effects to create an unforgettable live experience,” when they reopen later this year.
A couple of times at the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in the late 70s. Don’t remember much, only song I can remember was ELP’s “Tank”.
I saw the Stone Mountain laser light show in the 1980s, a new technology at the time, and it was pretty cool when they made Lee and Stonewall Jackson ride off the mountain on their horses. At the same time, it was creepy even then, seeing as only white people were in attendance.
Crazy Horse Monument has a low-budget version, in which they outline what the finished carving will look like illuminated on the partially done mountain. It’s nice, because I’ll never set that thing finished in my lifetime.
They were popular during my college years (1976-1980). I saw a laser light show (with Dark Side of the Moon as music, if I recall correctly) at the Hayden Planetarium in Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1977.
The audience was mostly high. As it happened, I was not in any way stoned, though that was purely by chance; I spent many a Friday and/or Saturday night in those days in a happy marijuana haze.
I wrote a tart review in my college newspaper that reflected my unflinching sobriety and suggested that, without the benefit of drugs, the laser show was trite - not meaning it as more than a passing observation, and certainly not intending it as an anti-drug screed. But it was, I guess, pithy and well written, in a curmudgeonly sort of way.
Unexpectedly, a professor wrote me a personal note lavishing praising my witty anti-drug review. It seems I unintentionally came across as a humorless anti-drug stick-in-the-mud.
That was not my intent at all. To this day, I wish I could have enjoyed a planetarium’s laser light show while in an altered state of consciousness. I just didn’t take my drug ingestion seriously enough to make it happen.
Ditto. Sometime in the 80s or 90s. I was underwhelmed. But I wasn’t a stoner, nor was I much of a Pink Floyd fan.
I saw Laser Beatles and Laser Pink Floyd at the McLaughlin Planetarium!
I saw it when I went in 2024. It is, indeed, not a laser show - it’s a 43-minute animated movie synced to the music.
The Wizard of Oz?
Laserium was the big company doing these, especially at first. I attended a laserium show at the Hayden Planetarium in New York with my parents.
The Hayden Planetarium in Boston (no relation) ran a competing laser show when I was there in the 1970s. It was called Love Light, and relied more on images than on abstract laser patterns.
(For some reason, I never saw the laser shows at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester.)
When I got to Salt Lake city in the 1980s Laserium ran a show there at the now-gone Hansen Planetarium. I got in free because some of my Optics students were working the show.
The shows all used a multiplexed Krypton Ion Laser, which could produce all the colors you needed simultaneously – red, green, yellow, and blue. They were split with a prism or grating and directed to sets of piezo-electrically controlled mirrors that directed them.
It was easy to generate circles and ellipses. (When I taught optics in Utah we had our own crude “laserium” using a red HeNe laser banked off a pair of controllable mirrors that could make ellipses). But the piezo mounts let you draw tringles, squares, etc., as well as more complex pictures. The most interesting laserium creation was a sort of free-form spirograph “cloud” of curving lines tracing a netlike pattern that was constantly changing and resembled smoke. They used it for the part of the show illustrating “Neptune, the Mystic” from Gustave Holst’s “Planets” Suite
Sad to say, I never watched any of these in an altered state of consciousness.
I saw Dark Side of the Moon at some planetarium as a teen some 30 years ago. Valley Fair, a ride theme park nearby had them late at night only a decade ago.
I don’t think they’d amaze this new generation.