| |
| Stars and Stars Are Not the Same |
| |
The methods used to copy the celestial lights differ greatly. Depending on the technology employed, stars appear more or less crisp or blurred, bright or faint. It takes mastery of optics and advanced technologies to make the copy look like the original.
Irrespective of the quality level a customer demands of star projection, the projected stars have one thing in common: they shun any other light than their own. A single slide picture projected on the dome makes the lords of the nightly sky look pale; the stray light of a panorama projection fades them into nothingness. Nothing is left of the beauty and grandeur of a thousand twinkling light spots or of the enchanting splendor of the Milky Way. The regrettable consequence is that the starry sky is out. Video projectors show us the red-hot interiors of stars, all-sky projections transport us into command stations of utopian spaceships traveling at light velocity. Before our eyes, novae take fire, planets are shattered, black holes devour us. Colored lasers flash right into our brains.
The stars are more than mere accessories or stage props: they deserve to remain the protagonists of the show. We can recognize them, identify them with their natural counterparts, grasp them with our eyes and minds. Watching them, we forget the chilliness of a cold winter night and become aware of the limited compass of our knowledge and experience.
So what can the show director do if star projections are too feeble to hold their own against competing devices? Allow visitors ten minutes to adapt their eyes to the dark, only to be dazzled soon again by a thunderstorm of effect projections? Employ projectors with ultra-powerful light sources to make the stars look less pale?
Nothing of the kind. Zeiss has a better solution: fiber optics.
Back to top | |
|