Digital Projection – The Ultimate?
Digital technology provides many advantages for the planetarium. Brightness levels, positions, running times: everything is recorded and indicated in terms of digital data. That makes every show exactly reproducible. However, a critical problem is how to project the stars as bright, point-like objects, as they appear to us in nature. A digital imaging system simply cannot achieve this effect. Those who insist on digital star projection must accept a result which is inferior in quality, a lot less realistic, and abstract. If the achievements of state-of-the-art optical technology are put to use, the projected dots representing low-magnitude stars are of a size below the threshold of our eyes’ resolving power. For those reasons, the new generation of Carl Zeiss planetarium projectors is a combination of digital and analog technologies. On the one hand, a state-of-the-art digital control system with a large number of digital drive controllers has been substituted for the analog gear trains with their inherent disadvantages. Yet the analog principle of star projection has been retained. Refined by means of optical fiber projectors, this technique has reached a level of quality that cannot be equalled, let alone out-performed, by any digital medium – and that will be the case for a long time to come. | About star projection:
 Fiber optics
Projecting stars
Star colors
Scintillation |