NEW YORK -- With the opening of the new Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History next month, one of the premiere star theatres of the 20th century will be dramatically reborn for the 21st.

The Hayden is the centerpiece, both in content and architecturally, of the museum's new $210 million Rose Center for Earth and Space. The 432-seat planetarium occupies the upper hemisphere of an immense aluminum-clad sphere levitated inside a nine-story glass cube. It hovers like a self-contained space station docking to upload passengers before it spins off into the heavens.

This computer illustration shows the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the right foreground in front of the lower-Manhattan skyline.

The new building will feature a sensational show of sound, light and darkness that is certain to provoke the imagination as much as it stimulates the senses.

The vaulting interior dome is built around the world's newest, most sophisticated star projector; seven of the largest video projectors made and a knock-your-socks-off sound system. All these elements combine to yield one of the most sophisticated planetarium shows ever produced.

The first of its kind, the show already has earned a reputation within the community of planetarium operators as having succeeded in an "awesome" task.

John Mosley is an astronomer at the legendary Griffith Observatory Planetarium in Los Angeles -- an institution which just announced its own plans for a $60-million to $70-million renovation project. Mosley said the Hayden's new multi-media skyshow will be truly cutting-edge entertainment and has been a major feat of both science and technological implementation.

"It's a real-time database that contains the actual positions and brightnesses of God-knows how many millions of objects -- so you can fly through it," Mosley said.

During more than 18 months of production, the show's creators put together accurate scientific information or supercomputer-generated calculations on the positions of more than 2 billion stars. The producers culled data from NASA and the European Space Agency to produce the data set that controls the star projector's display.

As viewers fly through the solar system, out into the Milky Way and then move deep into interstellar space, the projections have resolution that is high enough to let them move with enough speed so that the universe appears realistic. No hokey animations or jerky star movement here, said producers.

"They're putting enough money into it, and care into it," Griffith's Mosely said, "that it won't look like a cartoon of flying through the galaxy, but it'll give you the illusion of flying through the galaxy. And that's never really been done, other than just as a special-effects video creation."

Adding to the impact of the show is a set of seven of the largest video-display projectors in the world, integrated to cast full-color moving images across the dome. The most brilliant images of distant nebulae from the Hubble Space Telescope expand into view on a field of dark stars. Spectacular detail from solar-observing satellites shows the sun's dramatic activity. These pictures complement images of faraway radio galaxies, and even large images of Earth taken from space. The show also promises samples of the most sophisticated 3-D animation available.

Not just eye candy, though, the production boasts one of the best sound systems available. In this area, the planetarium catches up with smaller planetaria across the country that for decades have used perforated aluminum domes which allow speakers to be placed behind the dome. That allows for directional sound. The roar of a supernova exploding at the crown of the dome actually comes from that point -- an acoustic effect impossible inside the old plaster dome of the original Hayden.

The acoustics inside plaster-domed theaters, which have their speakers placed around the base of the dome, are renowned for being dreadful. "We compare it to being inside a garbage can," said Mosely, who also oversees a plaster-domed planetarium.

Apart from galactic-scale sound effects, the theater will pulse with music, and the narrative voice of Tom Hanks as he guides viewers through the Hayden's first show, "Passport to the Universe."

The planetarium isn't the Rose Center's only attraction.

Tucked in the orb's underbelly, beneath the main planetarium, is the one-of-a-kind Big Bang Theater. Essentially a planetarium upside down, viewers walk into a circular room where clear acrylic panels line the floor and wall-off a dish-shaped pit beneath them. As visitors watch the first moments of the universe play out beneath their feet, a ring of powerful sub-woofer speaker stacks shake the room to evoke the thunderous power of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang Theatre will dramatize what the beginning moments of the universe might have been like.

Exiting the Big Bang experience, visitors find themselves walking along a 300-foot-long descending ramp that spirals one-and-a-half times underneath the planetarium sphere. The "cosmic pathway" is a short walk through the 13 billion-year history of the universe. Strolling down the ramp where one step averages some 75 million years, visitors pass hundreds of millions of years of displays dedicated to objects so far away that they have never been seen.

Displays along the walkway walls describe these as "not yet discovered." Farther down, the walkway is lined with images of distant extragalactic objects, which give way too closer, younger ones, and eventually down to the formation of our own solar system. At he far end, at the very bottom of the ramp, the duration of time that humans have existed on the planet is presented -- an instant represented by the thickness of a human hair.

Like the rest of the exhibits in the Rose Center, the building's main hall is interesting and well presented enough to appeal to visitors from every age and experience. The museum features informative displays for the general public presented in a way that will surely keep even the most knowledgeable astrophysicists entertained.

A 9-foot Jupiter and a slightly smaller Saturn with rings that stretch 17 feet wide, as well as other representations of planets, stars and galaxies surround the planetarium sphere, threaded on cables that rise from floor to ceiling. The ground-floor plaza underneath the big hanging ball is arrayed with educational exhibits.

An asteroid-impact exhibit showcases the 15-ton (13,500-kilogram) Willamette meteorite that fell to Earth outside its namesake Oregon town in 1902. The hall around the base of the globe is paneled with exhibits that explain star formation, galaxies and globular clusters, as well as other inhabitants of the universe.

In its heyday, during middle of the 20th century, the Hayden inspired generations of New York youngsters -- NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and the Hayden Planetarium's current director Neil Tyson among them -- into careers in space and astronomy. With its new, sharp look, exciting star shows and solid educational exhibits, the new Rose Center will certainly captivate more generations, inspiring them to take giant steps into astronomy, astrophysics and space travel.