The five-year-old wait for stargazers, students and space enthusiasts looks likely to end with the Calcutta-based National Council of Science Museums promising the state government to hand over Jharkhand’s maiden planetarium at Ranchi’s Chiroundi in July-end.

If this happens, the planetarium’s formal inauguration will take place in August first week, said Rajesh Sharma, secretary, higher and technical education.

“The National Council of Science Museums has assured us that it will complete installing cutting-edge infrastructure at the planetarium and hand us the structure by July last week,” he said.

The National Council of Science Museums is executing the Rs 36-crore project through its agency Creative Museum Designers.

Under the plan, the capital’s sky theatre will sprawl 42,000sqm and boast twin sections — an astronomy gallery and an amateur astronomy club. The gallery, which will display exhibits, will have a 160-seat auditorium and a giant, dome-shaped projection screen to realistically simulate the complex motions of celestial objects. There are plans to screen documentaries, too.

Digital projectors had been proposed at the planetarium, but then those were junked as they lacked the ability to clearly show the images of distant stars and smaller celestial objects as such comets, asteroids and meteoroids.

Now, the planetarium will have the latest hybrid projector that combines both opto-mechanical and digital systems for a brighter and more realistic star field.

In February 2014, then CM Hemant Soren had laid the foundation of the planetarium project with a two-and-a-half-year deadline. “There were delays on our part but they were resolved in 2016-17,” said director G.S.P Gupta of Ranchi Science Centre, where the planetarium is being built. “We’d been running after the NCSM (the council) to finish the project, but it shifted focus to the Northeast. But now, it looks like we will soon get a cutting-edge planetarium in Ranchi,” Gupta said.