THE National Museum of Australia is cooking up a Boxing Day treat with a new virtual reality experience designed to takes visitors beyond the Milky Way.

“Beyond the Milky Way” is an an immersive 360° virtual reality cinema experience by filmmaker Briege Whitehead of White Spark Pictures, whose film “The Antarctica Experience” is also being shown at the museum.

“Beyond the Milky Way” will have its east-coast premiere at the NMA, from which it will take viewers, armed with VR headsets, to the radio-quiet WA outback to discover the SKA, the world’s largest radio telescopes. But they don’t look like anything you’ve seen before – some components even look like Christmas trees.

The UK-based SKA project aims to build the world’s largest and most capable radio telescopes and currently involves 16 nations. Australia will have 131,072 antennas, each two metres tall and shaped like a Christmas tree, receiving low-frequency radio waves. South Africa will have 197 dish antennas, receiving mid-frequency radio waves. The SKA will be 10 times more sensitive and much faster at surveying galaxies than any current radio telescopes.

“Beyond the Milky Way” takes visitors on a tour of Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, where the SKA-Low telescope is being constructed, and out into the universe using instruments already on site. They hear from astronomers who will use the SKA, as well as the Wajarri Yamaji people, who have been observing the stars for tens of thousands of years.

The White Spark team filmed with 360° cameras, custom-built drone and timelapse rigs, and pioneered new production technologies.

In “The Antarctica Experience”, museum visitors journey to the coldest place on earth, walk among penguins, gaze at the colours of the Southern Lights and to fly over and land on frozen landscapes from a helicopter.

“Beyond the Milky Way” and “The Antarctica Experience”, NMA, Acton, December 26. Sessions are about 30 minutes a film.