Home planetarium | |||||||||||||||||
It should not be difficult to couple up digital maps of the night sky and a small projector designed to point up, which replicates, right in your sleeping room, the bewitched ceiling of Hogwarts college refectory in "Harry Potter". One could actually download settings into the projector (by USB cable or whatever) so that the night sky might be from anywhere on the globe - or actually on the Moon - or may have clouds / shooting stars / comets coming in randomly etc. Of course the applications may be educational as well, so one would need an "accelerate" function. There may be a problem with noise, but remember that little power would be needed. This really is the flip side of another idea, "A starry night for once", calling for a voluntary shutting-off of city lights. If you can't beat the light polluters, join them ... on a small scale.
Rattoons, Jan 12 2004
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This exists in a primitive toy version which I beieve I have at the back of my closet somewhere. I don't think I ever opened it. Of course, as you say, now it can be done in a more advanced computerized way, hooked up to a PC. And the cutting-edge program that runs New York's fantastic Hayden planetarium is publicly available on the web at www.haydenplanetarium.org. This has a lot of advanced functions. Of course, any home projector is going to pale in comparison to the Zeiss Mark IX.
Ahem, I visited this site, liked it, surfed it, saw the "starry night" idea, got all worked up and posted this home planetarium stuff.
Then I got to my senses and used Google and Amazon.com ... and found it, or old-economy versions of it. I still think this stuff should go computer-controlled, that it may then aid star-navigation courses, that it could be marketed with the Harry Potter story, but basically the idea is already out there (in the US: actually Amazon.co.uk does NOT carry it so Europe may be a try).
Eastriver, you've been kind. Also I did not know about Hayden's site. Thanks.
OK, why not simply write a nice piece of software and use the ordinary data projector to throw the stars on your celiling?