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| Projection Planetariums from Carl Zeiss Set Standards of Excellence |
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In the summer of 1923, after three years of painstaking development work, Bauersfeld presented the first planetarium projector – intended for the Deutsches Museum – in a dome constructed by him on the roof the Zeiss factory in Jena. The official opening of the world’s first planetarium – Model I – took place in May 1925 to mark the inauguration of a new building of the Deutsches Museum. Today, the Deutsches Museum boasts a planetarium with a Zeiss M 1015 projector.
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| Design drawing of Model I. | One of 600 pages of handwritten notes on the planetarium. | Zeiss Model I planetarium projector in the Deutsches Museum with the Munich skyline. | The ”planetary framework”. |
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Even the first planetarium projector, the Model I, was a masterpiece of mechanical and optical engineering. The fixed star sphere containing 31 projectors was able to display as many as 4500 fixed stars. Eleven projectors allow the reproduction of the Milky Way, and 30 others showed the constellation figures. A ”planetary framework” received projectors for the reproduction of the sun with Aureole, of the moon with lunar phases and nodal regressions, and of planetary motions. However, the projectors were only able to display the sky as seen from latitude 48° north, i.e. from Munich. With the creation of Modell I, the first dumbbell-shaped projector, in 1926, the first step was taken toward the universal planetarium that can reproduce the motions of the stars from the perspective of any geographic latitude.
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