Roman Ponca spent an hour on his back in the Patagonian grass, camera rolling on a timelapse, while a cougar watched him from a distance. That shot never made the final cut of "Edge of the Sky." The shot that did is a single continuous timelapse from two 360-degree cameras strapped to a weather balloon, climbing through cloud layer after cloud layer until nothing is left in the frame but the Blue Marble. It's the moment audiences bring up first, almost every time. "Edge of th

On the morning of Friday, April 24, 2026, between 9:00 and 11:30 AM, on the second day of Dome Fest West, we did something a more cautious festival might have hesitated to do. We took the agenda away. There was no panel lined up at the front of the room. No keynote. No moderator with a clipboard of pre-vetted questions. Instead, there was a stack of blank index cards, a pile of markers, and one instruction. Write down the question or challenge you most want to talk about. If

Roughly 400 people came through Fiske Planetarium over five days in April. Attendees represented 14 countries. Two screening blocks sold out. And the people who were there left with something harder to measure than a badge scan: new friends, new ideas, and a clearer sense of where this industry is going. Dome Fest West 2026, the 5th Annual, wrapped April 26 in Boulder, Colorado. Here is what happened. Wednesday: Before It Even Started The festival technically opened Thursday.