Innovation Special Planetariums 9 - Carl Zeiss Planetariums

We think it is important for our visitors
not only to enjoy planetarium show but
also to look up at the real sky and find
the stars or constellations.
Inspiring visitors to look up at the real
sky, we needed to show stars as close to
natural starry sky as possible and provide
an interesting scientific theme with a
live commentary, not recording for every
single show (not very common in Japan).
Two projection systems
To project the beautiful starry sky and
the realistic pictures on a big dome, a
projector needs high quality. But it is
26 Innovation Special Planetariums 9, 2012
impossible to judge from catalog specification.
So we finally decided which
model of projectors we would use after
repeating trial and error.
We have both opto-mechanical and
digital planetarium in the dome. The
starball, UNIVERSARIUM Model IX from
Carl Zeiss is installed exactly in the
center of the dome. The new projector
equipped with fiber optics that makes it
possible to show the beautiful stars with
high brightness levels and small size. We
were able to negotiate Zeiss engineers
to adjust the brightness and color tone
of stars. They were so cooperative that
we were able to order digital controlled
shutters for the stars and Milky Way,
special constellation outlines and Japanese
characters. We visited their factory
in Jena three times and discussed trial
products such as interfaces for manual
operation again and again to work
closely.
The number of visible stars (6.5th magnitude)
to human eye is about 9,100.
It depends to sensitivity of the human
eye. There are some starballs projecting
more than millions of stars now but we
are not willing to project invisible stars.
About 9,100 are as many stars as we