Earthlight World Comes to ASTC 2026
In Phoenix this week, science-center leaders from around the world are getting an in-person look at an immersive astronaut experience built for the dome
Five years after Inspiration4 carried the first all-civilian crew to orbit, Earthlight World: An Astronaut’s Journey is playing this week inside Arizona Science Center’s Dorrance DOME.
The timing matters.
Arizona Science Center is hosting the 2026 Annual Conference of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, bringing science-center, museum, planetarium, education, and public-engagement professionals from across North America and around the world to Phoenix.
And every day of the conference, at 12:00 p.m., they have an opportunity to experience Earthlight World for themselves.
Created and narrated by Inspiration4 mission pilot Dr. Sian “Leo” Proctor, Earthlight World is an immersive fulldome journey built from what she saw, felt, and came to understand while looking back at Earth from orbit.
Dr. Proctor is attending every showing.
That makes this week more than a limited theatrical engagement.
It is, in effect, a live showcase for the people who decide what audiences will experience next in science centers and domes around the world.
A Show Designed for the Dome
Earthlight World blends 360-degree imagery with Dr. Proctor’s voice, poetry, artwork, science, and Afrofuturism.
Its subject is Earthlight: sunlight transformed by Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, and living systems before returning to space.
In orbit, Dr. Proctor gave that experience a name.
Earthlight.
The show invites audiences beneath that light and asks them to consider Earth not simply as a planet seen from space, but as a living world whose beauty, fragility, and interconnectedness become unmistakable when viewed whole.
At Arizona Science Center, that experience is being presented on the Dorrance DOME’s high-resolution LED surface.
Unlike a conventional planetarium projection system, the dome itself emits light.
For a story centered on the light of a living world, the medium is unusually fitting.
From One Dome to Many
Earthlight World: An Astronaut’s Journey was produced by the Museum of Science, Boston in partnership with Dr. Proctor and Space2Inspire and premiered at the Museum’s Charles Hayden Planetarium on June 13, 2026.
The show is co-authored by Dr. Sian Proctor and Astronaut Teacher Mike Mongo and was co-produced by Kyle Schember and the staff of the Charles Hayden Planetarium, with music by Test Shot Starfish and annu.
It is dedicated to space philosopher Frank White, author of The Overview Effect.
White coined the term “Overview Effect” to describe the profound shift in awareness astronauts often experience when seeing Earth from space.
He sees Earthlight as a complementary idea.
“Earthlight World is an amazing journey of inspiration and transformation. It will be good for our world if many people experience it. I see Earthlight and the Overview Effect as complementary.”
That possibility — many people experiencing it — is what makes ASTC 2026 especially significant.
Science centers, museums, and planetariums are where millions of people encounter science; not as abstraction but as an experience.
They are where astronomy becomes a sky overhead. Where planetary science becomes a world surrounding us.
Where a child who has never imagined themselves in space can suddenly look up and understand that space belongs to them, too.
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This week, the people who build those experiences are gathered in Phoenix.
And Earthlight World is playing in the dome next door.
An Invitation to the Science Center Community
For ASTC delegates, the opportunity is unusually direct. Experience the show. Meet the astronaut who created it. See how audiences respond.
Imagine what it could become inside another dome, another museum, another science center, another city.
Earthlight World was made to travel.
Its central idea is universal because its subject is universal: the one living world every audience member already belongs to.
The question now is how many people might one day stand beneath that light.
A Phoenix Homecoming
There is another reason Phoenix is an especially meaningful place for this moment.
Dr. Proctor has lived in the Phoenix Valley since 1994.
She earned a master’s degree in geology and a doctorate in science education from Arizona State University and spent more than 25 years teaching geoscience through the Maricopa Community Colleges.
Arizona is where she became a scientist and educator.
Five years ago, she saw Earth from orbit.
Now she has returned with a work created from that experience.
“Arizona is where I became a scientist, and where I spent decades teaching Maricopa Community College students to read the story of our planet in its rocks and sky. Five years ago, I saw that story from orbit, written in light. Sharing Earthlight here, with the community that shaped me, is a homecoming,” said Dr. Proctor.
That homecoming is happening inside a gathering of people whose work is to carry science outward.
Which makes Phoenix not simply another stop for Earthlight World.
It may be a beginning.
Earthlight Beyond the Dome
A companion book, Earthlight World, co-authored by Dr. Proctor and Mike Mongo, is forthcoming in Winter/Spring 2027.
The book expands the ideas introduced in the fulldome experience and develops the scientific case for Earthlight as the spectral signature of a living planet: sunlight transformed by Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, and biosphere before returning to space.
Together, the show and book are part of a larger effort to give audiences a new way of thinking about Earth from the perspective of space.
Not simply as something we live on.
As something alive in light.
See Earthlight World at ASTC 2026
Earthlight World: An Astronaut’s Journey plays daily at 12:00 p.m. from September 16 through 20, 2026, in the Dorrance DOME at Arizona Science Center.
Dr. Sian Proctor is attending each performance.
Runtime: 22 minutes
Location: Dorrance DOME, Arizona Science Center
600 E. Washington St., Phoenix, Arizona
For ASTC attendees, this week offers something rare:
The chance not only to see a new fulldome experience, but to imagine where it might go next.
If you can imagine Earthlight World in your dome, come experience it in ours.
