Kenner Planetarium & MegaDome Cinema

The 50-foot dome sits in Kenner's Rivertown district, 2020 Fourth Street, one of the few planetariums in Louisiana outside Baton Rouge. New Orleans grew as a port city — by the start of the Civil War, it was the largest city in the South, exporting cotton and farm products to Western Europe and New England through the Mississippi River. The city's scale ran on the river and the wharves, and infrastructure followed that gravity.

Inside are 118 stadium-style seats facing the domed screen. Friday and Saturday nights, the facility runs laser shows set to classic rock and pop. Families come. Teenagers come. The French founded New Orleans in 1718 at a bend in the Mississippi chosen partly because it sat adjacent to the trading route and portage between the river and Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John — a path that offered access to the Gulf without going downriver a hundred miles. Three centuries later, this planetarium sits in a suburban district, pointing its audience not toward the water but upward, toward fifty feet of curved screen and whatever moves across it.