Fairbanks has long been a place where people look up. On clear winter nights the aurora unrolls across the sky in green and violet curtains, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks has spent decades studying what happens up there. So it is fitting that the newest place to watch the cosmos in Fairbanks sits inside the university's own museum — and that this October it is getting a little strange.
On Friday, October 16, 2026, the UA Museum of the North presents a Halloween-inspired edition of its planetarium program, Alaska's Wild Sky. The show promises a tour of the cosmos filled with creepy constellation myths, strange and eerie sounds from across the solar system, and some of the weirdest-looking objects lurking in space. It is a seasonal twist on the museum's regular live planetarium programming, and it is aimed at anyone who has ever looked at a nebula and thought it looked like a ghost.
The setting matters as much as the subject. The show takes place in the Walt & Marita Babula Planetarium, the 65-seat theater at the museum that is, by the museum's own accounting, North America's northernmost planetarium.
The planetarium itself is the payoff of a long-held local dream. For decades, UAF and the museum wanted a dome of their own. That dream became concrete when Walt and Marita Babula, a Fairbanks couple who had given anonymously, stepped forward with a $7.4 million donation — the single largest gift ever made to the University of Alaska by living individuals. The 5,700-square-foot addition, built onto the museum's west side, houses an 11-meter (36-foot) dome, two ultrahigh-resolution projectors, four image-generation computers, and theater-quality sound. It is a collaboration between the UA Museum of the North and the UAF Geophysical Institute, the research arm that has made Fairbanks a global center for auroral and space physics.
The Babulas are not astronomers by trade. Walt Babula arrived in Fairbanks in 1970 and was stationed at Bassett Army Hospital at Fort Wainwright, where he became the post's first full-time orthodontist; he founded the Fairbanks Orthodontic Group in 1974 and has cared for Interior Alaska families ever since. Marita Babula began her career at Fort Wainwright in Army Community Services before becoming the practice's office manager. In a written statement, the couple said Fairbanks had been their home for several decades and that they were "pleased to give back to a community that we love." They described the planetarium as a place that will "spark the curiosity of Alaskans and visitors from around the globe about our Alaska culture and vast universe."
The planetarium opened to the public on Saturday, April 25, 2026 — International Astronomy Day — with a day of free activities, night-sky tours, and full-dome show previews running every 20 minutes. "The Walt and Marita Babula Planetarium is where science and storytelling meet," planetarium director Omega Smith said at the time. "It's a place where complex ideas become immersive experiences and where every visit has the potential to ignite curiosity and deepen our understanding of the world, and universe, around us." Smith added that the staff was "thrilled about having the community come into our dome for the first time."
That blend of science and storytelling is exactly what the October program leans into. Constellation myths are among the oldest stories humans tell about the sky, and many of them are, on close inspection, genuinely grim — hunters torn apart, maidens chained to rocks, monsters wheeling overhead. Pairing those tales with the actual sounds of space, the plasma waves and radio emissions that researchers convert into audio, gives the evening a different flavor than the museum's standard night-sky tour. The solar system, it turns out, is a noisy place, and much of what it has to say is unsettling.
The museum's planetarium shows generally run about 45 minutes and pair a fulldome film with a live tour of the night sky and beyond. Tickets for this program are sold at the museum's front desk, and the museum advises arriving early for ticketing because the show starts promptly at 7 p.m. and there is no late entry. General admission is listed at $16, with reduced rates of $12 for youth ages 5 to 17 and for UA staff, faculty, and students, and $8 for museum members. The museum is at 907 Yukon Drive on the UAF campus.
For a state that spends half the year in darkness, a Halloween planetarium show is a natural fit. Fairbanks residents already live with long nights, and the museum's dome offers a way to make sense of them — or, for one evening in October, to enjoy being a little spooked by them. The program sits alongside the museum's other fall offerings, including the Field Notes to Fulldome series, a five-part run pairing the Geophysical Institute's fulldome production Listening to Alaska with live talks from researchers studying the state's aurora, earthquakes, fossils, permafrost, climate, and cultural history.
But the October 16 show is the one with the monsters. Black holes, zombie stars, ghostly nebulae, and the myths that gave them their names — all projected onto a 36-foot dome in the northernmost planetarium in North America, on a fall night in Fairbanks when the real sky outside is already dark enough to be unsettling.