Planetarium Technology
Brilliance and Naturalness with Fiber Optics
In the fiber optics star projector, the light is only conducted to where it is needed - to the perforations of the star mask. The radiation emitted by the light source is collected and guided exclusively to the perforations, resulting in a dramatic brightness gain. With this projector, Carl Zeiss also created the technical conditions needed to reduce the diameters of the projected stars to a dimension below the resolving power of the human eye. Artificial stars provided with the ZEISS fiber optics show the "beaming" known from natural stars – a fantastic sight!
The high contrast between the stars and the background lends amazing depth to the "fiber sky".

A star projector contains up to 1000 glass fibers of different thicknesses. Each of them must be aligned to an accuracy of a thousandth of a millimeter.

The fiber optics have four distinct benefits:
  • Dramatic increase in star brightness
  • Significant shrinking of star diameters to below the resolving power of the human eye
  • Drastic reduction in lamp power
  • Possibility to reduce the dome reflectance in favor of image projections with greater contrast, brilliance and color saturation.
More information
Fiber Optic Starfield