Planetarium Star Projectors

[SpitzSTP]

Re-wiring continues, fortunately most of the connections are labelled. Chuck Bueter helped to dismantle the machine at P-H-M in Indiana. Chuck is great man that I had the honor to spend a little time with, and he had a great deal to say about the Transit of Venus -- a project he did alot of work on. I now back-track Chuck's work, almost two years later.

P-H-M is an interesting planetarium. The Director, Art Klinger, spent decades amassing a priceless collection of space-related artifacts, including some space-flown items on loan from NASA, which are displayed in glass cases along the perimeter of the dome.

[SpitzSTP]

All of the wiring on the projector is done. I spent the day putting the access panels back on. Just lately I tend to spend all day Saturday working on the "theater", then fire up shows at around 10 pm. Each week it gets better as more capabilities are added. I added stars tonight and the result was spectacular as a backdrop against laser abstracts. The stars are not washed out as I had feared. The only catch is that it must be totally dark in here to achieve the desired effect. I cheated a little bit for now by running the star lamps at an extra 20 volts until I get the windows covered. Using stars as a backdrop adds another dimension and enhances the immersive effect. I like most of the AVI show material but I prefer my own music tracks. Adding visuals to music I have loved for years is tremendously gratifying. I added a CD player to the mixer last week to swap from the HD24 audio feed to something different. Following that thread, I am adding two PC's with stereo feeds to the mixer, each loaded with MP3's so I can sit at the console and sort of play DJ (VJ? VDJ?) to the visuals. Its really alot of fun. The end game of this will probably be to take the best stuff and sync it to different music. With 30 shows on the HD24 there are hours of abstracts to choose from. I hope to get the Minolta completely functional over the next week or so, but the stars are working and that's a step forward. All of the equipment is packed tightly together with a sofa in the middle, with the speakers up high and behind. When it is dark and everything working together, I forget about everything else.. for a little while.

[Jem]

I'm still absolutely loving following your story on bringing these 'Gems' back to life. Please keep posting the updates

[SpitzSTP]

I'm still absolutely loving following your story on bringing these 'Gems' back to life. Please keep posting the updates

Thanks Jem ! The Minolta/Viewlex Series IIB is further along with starglobe cooling fans now operational. The cooling fans were disconnected when the projector was disassembled and it took alot of patience to figure out how these are wired, since no records were kept and I have no schematic. This is a major accomplishment, considering that these fans have not worked since the projector came out of Indiana.

Many thanks to my friend in Cave Creek who has the only other projector of this type in Arizona, who helped me figure it out. These cooling fans use permanent split-capacitor motors and require a run capacitor. They are also a really odd size with case dimensions in metric. Made by Oriental Motor, they are no longer available (unless from Minolta at a huge price) and it is a stroke of good luck that these are working just fine now that they are wired correctly.

The bulb inside the star chamber is 500 watts and bright enough to hurt my eyes just looking at it. It gets hotter than a pistol inside the chamber so proper cooling is essential.

There is 30 years worth of dirt caked on everything which I am slowly cleaning out. Karl, please bring the long Q-tips next time ? I reconfigured "the theater", moving the stereo and AVI control cabs together and putting the HGM8 in the corner so everything is consolidated and easier to operate.

[SPCNAXOS]

Hi everyone,
l am new to the forum and can see I have found some kindred spirits here. Sheldon

[SpitzSTP]

Hi everyone,
l am new to the forum and can see I have found some kindred spirits here. Sheldon

Hey Sheldon, welcome !! Yes, kindred spirits over here. Please share your posts!! Karl and Swami came over this weekend and we ran some shows, and saw some stars from the Viewlex Series IIB. It was interesting to see the AVI shows through Karl's RGB projector, very bright and in full color. Swami played a few of his shows, and they were spectacular. A fun way to spend a Saturday evening

[SpitzSTP]

Karl dropped by this evening to do some fine tuning on the HGM8. It had become out-of-alignment since I moved the cart from one part of the house to the other, and the beam was not going down the fiber correctly. Karl rectified that, and in the process discovered that there had been a piece of clear packing tape over the laser output mirror this whole time. Probably placed there by the person I bought it from 2 years ago, to protect it in transit. The colors are now far more vivid and brighter than ever before. We had the Minolta star projector providing a beautiful backdrop of stars which really adds an extra dimension to the shows. It just keeps getting better. This weekend, the mission is to finish cabling up the star projector to the control console and card rack, and add more cooling fans to the HGM8 and AVI card cage. Heat buildup is becoming a real issue in here, with so much stuff running at a time -plus- 110-degree Phoenix heat doesn't help much either. The star machine alone is burning two 500-watt lamps, just for the stars. Spent coolant water goes to the Jasmine garden out front, blooming profusely and emitting a heavy, intoxicating perfume into the night air providing yet another reason to smile.

[Laser Wizardry]

" 15 characters"

[SpitzSTP]

Next on the docket will be to add a pair of cooling fans to the HGM8 case, next to the pass bank and more cooling fans on the AVI card rack. Karl tells me that the HGM8 was never designed to be kept on for a long time, in laser-show mode since this was a short-use medical unit so the additional cooling may well extend the life of the laser by a factor of years.

The Minolta/Viewlex projector is almost completely wired up, however, I neglected to take a picture of how it was originally wired to the breaker box in Indiana. It could have been setup for 220/240V, but I don't remember because it was two years ago and the superintendent of schools was really on my case to hurry up and get the equipment out.

This happens alot on these "pulls", where the management wants the old equipment out really fast and there is little or no patience for picture-taking and diagram-making, they just want the job done and they want it out of there f-a-s-t. I can understand that, from their point of view.. out with the old, and in with the new, and this is just one of numerous challenges in "saving" vintage technology from the dumpster out back.

During one projector pull, I had permission to work into the night because it was taking so long (pulling cables from underfloor tracks, instead of cutting them). However, the fact that I was in the planetarium at night was not adequately conveyed to the night security guard staff and I was involuntarily detained at around 3 am by several security guards who thought I had backed a Penske truck up to the planetarium to steal it.

[swamidog]

karl and i went over to spitzstp's house last night for project: red laser.

we have not been able to meet the power requirements for the coherent purelight, so we wanted to try adding some diode red.

i took the easy job of building out a dual 660nm module and gave karl the hard job of combining the red module with the argon.



karl was a able to to hack the red module into the the fiber coupler, but we need to do a little more machining before we can get the red and the argon both going into the fiber. the fiber coupler head is very small and most of the space is taken up by the pcaom.



it was well after midnight before we gave up for the night. i'm confident we can make it work, we just need to drill and tap some mounting holes for the cyan dichro. the tolerances are extremely fine and it's impossible to get the alignment right until everything can be locked down.

we stayed way too late watching shows. i got home about 3am this morning and have been useless all day.

but the light....








more photos here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/101458881344191483852/posts