Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is one of the oldest and largest planetariums in the United States having welcomed over 7 million visitors by its 60th anniversary in 2009. As a unit of the university, Morehead receives about one-third of its funding through state sources, one-third through ticket and gift sales, and one-third through gifts and grants.

First opened in 1949, the planetarium was used to train Gemini and Apollo program astronauts in celestial navigation. Until the late 1990s, it contained one of the largest working Copernican orreries in the world. The facility was donated to the university by alumnus John Motley Morehead III who invested over $3 million in the facility.

From 1959 through 1975 every astronaut in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project programs spent hours in celestial navigation training at the planetarium. Morehead technicians developed simplified replicas of flight modules and tools for use in the training, often from plywood or cardboard. A mockup simulating key parts of the Gemini capsule was constructed from plywood and mounted on a barber chair to enable changes in pitch and yaw. Several of these items are on display at the planetarium. That training may have helped save astronauts' lives on occasion. Astronauts aboard Apollo 12 called upon that training after their Saturn V rocket was hit by lightning twice during ascent, knocking spacecraft systems offline and requiring them to configure navigation systems based on fixes taken manually. Gordon Cooper used his training to make the most accurate landing of Project Mercury after a power failure affected navigational systems. Astronauts enjoyed soft drinks, cookies and other snacks during their intense hours-long training session, leading planetarium employees to create the code name "cookie time" to refer to the training sessions. Occasionally word did leak out and noted clothing designer and Chapel Hill native Alexander Julian recalls meeting Mercury Astronauts during a visit to the planetarium while in junior high. Morehead's planetarium seats about 240 people, with a dome that is 68 feet (21 m) in diameter and 44 feet (13 m) tall. It currently boasts two different projection systems.

Morehead's historic star projector, a Carl Zeiss Model VI, was installed in 1969 and remained in limited use as of April 2011, primarily for field trip groups. This projector displays about 8,900 different stars on the dome overhead. The analog planetarium shows are a combined effort of the Zeiss projector, slide projectors and video projectors working together to form a multimedia experience.

Planetarium officials hope to display at least a portion of the projector somewhere in the center. The projector was removed in August 2011.