The project started with on-site research at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO). After visiting the observatory with my family and learning that much of the public experience was volunteer‑run, I offered to help modernize their media and asked whether they had ever explored VR. That conversation led to a collaboration with the former NRC Victoria director, who had championed the observatory’s Oculus Go program. Over several visits, I began building a digital twin of the site: flying a Mavic Air drone (with an advanced drone license) to capture aerial imagery, using a digital laser measure and iPhone scans for accurate dimensions, and gathering archived images and blueprints.A chance meeting at a star party connected me with a certified telescope operator, which in turn led to security clearance and training through the NRC to operate the DAO telescope for Saturday night star parties. That access was crucial. It allowed me to record reference photos, measurements, ambient audio, and operation workflows, as well as study the software and UI that control the telescope. All of this material fed directly into the Unity build: environment models created in Blender, a DAO‑inspired telescope and dome, and interaction systems implemented with the XR Interaction Toolkit. AI language models helped with implementing and validating the more complex astronomical calculations, drawing on work such as Jean Meeus’s algorithms to keep motions and positions believable in VR.