Located in the proximity of Nandan, Rabindra Sadan, Academy of Fine Arts and St Paul's Cathedral, the unusual single-storey circular building of Birla Planetarium, loosely designed like the Buddhist Stupa in Sanchi, is the largest planetarium in Asia and the second largest in the world.

Built in the year 1962, the iconic building of the planetarium, officially named M P Birla planetarium, was inaugurated by the then Prime Minister, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru on 2nd July 1963. Also known as Taramandal, it was the brainchild of Mr M P Birla, an industrialist and philanthropist based out of Kolkata, and was constructed by ML Dalmiya & Co, owned by late Mr Jagmohan Dalmia, the former President of Board of Control for Cricket in India, popularly known as BCCI. Birla Planetarium, the first public planetarium in India, as well as one of the largest in the world in terms of its seating capacity, was subsequently recognised as a Scientific and Industrial Research Organization by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), a part of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the government of India.

Set up as a foundation to serve as an institution dedicated to the study of science and research, the planetarium conducts several public shows in several languages, including English, Bengali and Hindi, featuring Zodiac signs and Stars, Journey of Antarctic and New View of Solar System, Cosmic Collisions, and also Our Universe, the newly introduced show after the renovation of the building in 2017.

The shows create mesmerising effect on the visitors, and the practice of delivering live lectures during the shows also offers them a unique opportunity to interact with experts to quench their thirst of knowledge.

Apart from primarily being a planetarium, containing an astronomical observatory equipped with a powerful telescope with accessories, it also houses an astronomy gallery, displaying a huge collection of beautiful paintings and models of renowned astronomers, as well as an electronics laboratory, where equipments necessary for study of science are designed, fabricated, and display their practical utility. In addition to that, it offers a free evening course on astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology, for students with a background in Physics and Mathematics, and introduced a post-graduate Diploma course in Astronomy and Planetary Sciences in 1993, with a detailed curriculum in astrophysics and astronomy.

There are also a series of graded programmes conducted for school kids, according to their age groups.

The planetarium was closed for a long period of 28 months for renovation, and reopened to the public on 18 July 2017, when the most advanced Carl Zeiss Hybrid Projection System was introduced, replacing the original Universal Planetarium projector from Carl Zeiss in Germany which had operated for 100,000 hours for 52 years, from the day of its inception. The new Hybrid Planetarium, equipped with the advanced optical-mechanical projector StarMaster, also called Starball, is synchronized with a dome video display system. With superimposed images of constellation outlines, galaxies and nebulae, planets and moons, the Starball offers the most realistic field of stars in the dome, aided by nine ultra high resolution Velvet digital projectors, also known as full-dome projection.