The night sky will become a playground for light-inspired creativity when Bishop Museum presents a limited engagement of laser shows at its J. Watumull Planetarium.

The shows will bring the brilliant, high-focus intensity of laser-created imagery, accompanied by pop music, to the planetarium starting today and through Jan. 5.

The schedule leads off with the Halloween-themed "Fright Light" and a Greek myth, "Legends of the Night Sky, Perseus and Andromeda."

"It’s the first time that laser shows will be shown in a domed theater on Oahu," said planetarium director Mike Shanahan.

A laser — the term is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" — is a device that enables light to be emitted in a tightly focused beam and at a narrow range of frequency, resulting in a saturated color.

"It’s a way of creating light of just one color rather than of all the colors of the rainbow mixed together," Shanahan said. "And the purity, that’s what is really striking. The brightness of laser light is like nothing else we have in a domed environment."

Laser shows started back in the 1970s in Los Angeles and quickly spread to other mainland planetariums. Those early shows could project images only in a single, primary color, but these days lasers mix and match red, green and blue light to create the full spectrum of visible colors.

A brief preview of one of the shows, performed to Pink Floyd’s "Dark Side of the Moon," showed a series of lines, as bright as neon lights on a dark night, moving across the planetarium dome, coalescing in a variety of psychedelic patterns. In another sequence a figure of a man materialized and walked across the dome, eventually sitting in a chair and spinning around.

All that comes from a projector no larger than a small microwave oven. Inside are the lasers, coupled with mirrors that fuse the light to create the images and colors. A small console programmed with the desired imagery and accompanying music controls the laser projector and plugs into the planetarium’s sound system.

Shanahan said the device is a perfect complement to the existing technology at Watumull Planetarium, which two years ago got a new star machine and covered its domed screen with the latest in video gear. Those technologies have advantages and disadvantages, Shanahan said.

"Video has never been good at presenting the nighttime skies," he said. "The star machine is way better at presenting the nighttime sky. With video the stars are blobs … so if you’re trying to find a faint constellation like Pisces, it’s so hard.

"(The star machine) gives us a beautiful star field, and then the video does everything else great — ‘flying’ to Saturn, ‘flying’ to Orion nebula, going back a million years in time. This is the third level of enhancement, because now we have the star machine, the video and now the laser system."

All three technologies will be blended together for the planetarium show so that, for example, the show "Legends of the Night Sky, Perseus and Andromeda" can show the figures from the Greek myth set against their constellations.

Other shows include "Laser Zeppelin" featuring the music of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd’s "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall," and a show set to the music of the Beatles. A holiday show will be added starting around Thanksgiving, and other shows might be added.

Bishop Museum is renting the laser setup for now, but Shanahan said if the shows prove popular, the museum might consider getting its own device, which costs about $40,000. The museum could then develop its own shows, using Hawaii themes like volcanoes or the ocean and setting them to Hawaiian music.

"We’re just testing the waters," Shanahan said.