It’s not quite C.S. Lewis’s magic wardrobe – but a little room in Albion College’s new Science Complex does open into a whole new world. Earlier this summer, Albion College’s Physics department installed a “stellarium,” a three-dimensional model of the stars in our “local” universe.

A glass cube roughly 3’ square, the stellarium houses 253 stars ranging in size from tiny pinpoints to small peas. These 253 lights are all the known stars in our local space “neighborhood," which is an intimate 28.7 light years across. “Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and contains around 200 billion stars,” says Nicolle Zellner, a lunar researcher and physics professor at Albion. “This stellarium represents just a tiny part of it.”

Gazing into the stellarium, viewers can see familiar (or at least heard-of) stars, like Alpha Centauri, Vega, Sirius, and the sun. The unique, three-dimensional presentation is fascinating and disorienting, even for veteran star-gazers.

“I’ve taken a stellarium like this to conferences of planetarium directors, and out of a roomful of professionals, only one person could find the sun – and they all knew it was in the center,” said John Carl, a California astronomer who built and installed Albion’s stellarium. “It’s the difference between looking at a map in a book and looking at a globe.”

And don’t bother asking why Earth – or even Pluto – isn’t in the box. "This stellarium is on an atomic scale – these lights are like atoms representing the actual stars,” Carl explains. “On this scale, Pluto is only a few millionths of an inch away from the sun.”

Zellner anticipates using the stellarium in both her introductory and advanced astronomy courses, as well as opening it to visiting school groups. “The stellarium shows that there’s a lot of space between the stars. It also shows that many stars exist in multiple systems and that our sun, by itself, is unique. It’s a great tool to use to help students understand the relative distances between stars and what our local neighborhood looks like.”