While there is now a large number of truly breathtaking full dome planetarium shows (covering a wide range of scientific topics) available to planetaria worldwide, there is clearly a need for low-cost (or even free) full-dome content, to allow planetaria to stretch their programming capabilities.   With this goal in mind, Science on the Half Sphere (as part of CosmoQuest) will host a wide variety of full-dome images and videosthat can be readily used in other planetaria (and free for use; see copyright notice below).  SotHS is a partnership between CosmoQuest and people at the Ward Beecher Planetarium, at Youngstown State University.

This page includes a series of timelapse videos (and the source images) of some of the telescopes of the Mauna Kea Observatories, one of the foremost astronomical observatories in the world.   With a summit located at 13, 796 feet (4205 m), the dark and (often) clear skies make Mauna Kea one of the finest locations for which international astronomers can taken high quality data of the many wonders of the universe.   Some videos of the night sky as seen from Mauna Kea are also included.

These timelapse videos and related images are available for free for non-commercial use (under a Creative Commons license), provided proper image credit is given.  Funding for the equipment and taking of these images was provided through a National Science Foundation research grant (AST-0908377), as part of the broader impact for a large-scale survey of globular clusters in the Virgo galaxy cluster.  This research is but one of many facets of the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS), a continuing program that makes use of data from some of the observatories on Mauna Kea; in particular, the project is based on the incredible imaging capabilities of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

About the Images/Videos : the fisheye images were taken with a Canon 7D camera with a 5.6mm fisheye lens (custom setup from Dome3D).    Individual images (domemasters) are provided as JPEG  images at a resolution of 2048×2048 pixels,.  The timelapse videos are available as 2Kx2K MOV files, at 30 frames per second.

Please enjoy the images!   If you do use any of these images in your programs, please let Durrell know via email (prdurrell ‘at’ edu); CosmoQuest and the NSF  are interested in knowing these images are being used for their intended purpose.

Dr. Patrick Durrell, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Youngstown State University

The shadow of Mauna Kea	The ‘rising’ of the shadow of Mauna Kea (551 images; 19sec at 30fps)  2K domemasters   2K MOV
Motion of 4 of the dishes of the Submillimeter Array (SFA)	The Harvard-Smithsonian Submillimeter Array (SMA) (124 images; 4sec at 30fps)  2K domemasters   2K MOV
Gemini North	The Gemini North Telescope (outside) (328 images; 11sec at 30fps)  2K domemasters   2K MOV
Gemini North	The Gemini North Telescope – afternoon tests (sequence 1) (322 images; 10sec at 30fps) 2K domemasters   2K MOV
Gemini North	The Gemini North Telescope – afternoon (sequence 2) (233 images; 6 sec at 30fps) 2K domemasters   2K MOV
Gemini North – towards sunset	The Gemini North Telescope – before sunset (sequence 3) (347 images; 12sec at 30fps) 2K domemasters   2K MOV
Motion of Gemini North 8m telescope.	The Gemini North Telescope – before sunset (sequence 4) (356 images; 12sec at 30fps)  2K domemasters   2K MOV
Night Sky from Mauna Kea – sequence 1	Night Sky from Mauna Kea – 3hr (total) sequence (306 images; 10sec at 30fps)  2K domemasters   2K MOV
Night Sky from Mauna Kea – sequence 2	Night Sky from Mauna Kea – 30 min sequence (65 images; 2sec at 30fps)  2K domemasters   2K MOV

We were on CosmoQuest’s Hangoutathon on June 16th, 2013 to talk about these timelapse videos. The hangout-a-thon segment can be viewed below:

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Matt Mascheri at Dome3D, who customized the camera setup and the training needed for the production of these images.  Many of the images were taken with the help and guidance of Jean-Charles Cuillandre at the CFHT, Joy Pollard at Gemini, and Glen Petitpas at the SMA.  YSU photography student Christen Higgins also helped immensely with some of the Photoshop work.

Copyright Notice – these images & timelapses are made available under a Creative Commons license, and are FREE for non-commercial use, provided proper image credit is given (varies with each sequence; refer to image metadata).

While there is now a large number of truly breathtaking full dome planetarium shows (covering a wide range of scientific topics) available to planetaria worldwide, there is clearly a need for low-cost (or even free) full-dome content, to allow planetaria to stretch their programming capabilities.   With this goal in mind, Science on the Half Sphere (as part of CosmoQuest) will host a wide variety of full-dome images that can be readily used in other planetaria (and free for use; see copyright notice below).  SotHS is a partnership between CosmoQuest and people at the Ward Beecher Planetarium, at Youngstown State University.

All 56 fulldome stills of the Mauna Kea Observatories; these are freely available in any of 3 resolutions

This page includes a series of images of telescopes on Mauna Kea, one of the foremost astronomical observatories in the world.   With a summit located at 13, 796 feet (4205 m), the dark and (often) clear skies make Mauna Kea one of the finest locations for which international astronomers can taken high quality data of the many wonders of the universe.

These images are available for free for non-commercial use, provided proper image credit is given.  Funding for the equipment and taking of these images was provided through a National Science Foundation research grant (AST-0908377), as part of the broader impact for a large-scale survey of globular clusters in the Virgo galaxy cluster.  This research is but one of many facets of the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS), a continuing program that makes use of data from some of the observatories on Mauna Kea; in particular, the project is based on the incredible imaging capabilities of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

About the Images : the fisheye images were taken with a Canon 7D camera with a 5.6mm fisheye lens (custom setup from Dome3D).    Images are provided as PNG images in 3 different resolutions : 1024×1024 pixels, 2048×2048 pixels, and 4096×4096 pixels.  The vast majority of the images were HDR (High Dynamic Range) processed, from a combination of 3 bracketed exposures taken at different apertures.

Please enjoy the images!   If you do use any of these images in your programs, please let Durrell know via email (prdurrell ‘at’ edu); CosmoQuest and the NSF  are interested in knowing these images are being used for their intended purpose.

Dr. Patrick Durrell
Dept. of Physics & Astronomy
Youngstown State University

NOTE: the links below are for .zip files containing the images in the different resolutions (and links to the telescope websites).

Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) – 9 images   1K   2K   4K
Gemini North Telescope  (Gemini Observatory) – 14 images   1K   2K   4K
James-Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) – 5 images   1K   2K   4K
Submillimeter Array (SMA) – 2 images (all resolutions)
Mauna Kea Summit – 20 images   1K   2K    4K
Night Sky from Mauna Kea – 6 images   1K   2K   4K

We were on CosmoQuest’s Hangoutathon on June 16th, 2013 to talk about these images.  The hangout-a-thon can be viewed below:

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Matt Mascheri at Dome3D, who customized the camera setup and the training for the production of these images.  Many of the images were taken with the help and guidance of Jean-Charles Cuillandre at the CFHT, Joy Pollard and Peter Michaud at the Gemini Observatory, and Glen Petitpas at the SMA.

Copyright Notice – these fisheye images are made available under a Creative Commons license, and are made available for FREE for non-commercial use, provided proper image credit is given (varies with each image; refer to image metadata).

We are in the process of developing a series of Creative Commons  planetarium shows that you can edit with attribution and use within your own facility.

• Cosmic Castaways:  The show tells the story of how stars are torn from galaxies during galactic interactions.
  
• Art * Science * Wonder
  

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways. In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made. The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!

In the next series of postings, we will focus on Annie Wilson, our animation guru, who did an enormous amount of work on Cosmic Castaways. Take it away Annie!

Seek Blender Training

So you want to learn how to use Blender to create fulldome videos.  May the Force be with you.

Getting started with Blender

I’m going to assume that you’ve downloaded the lastest version of Blender.  More builds are available at GraphicAll.org but they are customized (and sometimes experimental) and chances are that you won’t need anything beyond the trunk version available from Blender.org.

Register for (or at least bookmark) CGTextures, OpenGameArt, BlendSwap, BlenderArtists, and Blendertarium.  You’ll use at least one of these sites during the course of a project.

If you have the money or opportunity to get Blender training, do it.  Professional training materials are usually very easy to follow and sometimes come with freebies that you can use in your own projects. We purchased the platinum package for Blender Guru’s Nature Academy.  Blender Foundation also sells training materials on DVD, most of which focus on animated creatures or people.  Blender Cookie requires a modest subscription for full access to all of their courses.  For planetarium-specific training Blender workshops are sometimes offered at conferences.

If you don’t have the money, don’t despair!  Most of the training material out there is available as free tutorials.  Browse BlenderGuru and do web searches for Blender tutorials.  Having problems finding current tutorials?  Add the version of Blender that you are using to your search.

There are multiple rendering engines in Blender: Internal (Blender Render), Game, and Cycles.  Do yourself a favor and focus on learning Cycles.  The internal render engine is no longer in development and support may be dropped entirely.  The good news is that most features that were previously only available with the Internal engine are now available with Cycles.

Now that you’ve downloaded Blender, bookmarked your resources, and found your training of choice it’s time to make things!  Ensure that you won’t have any interruptions for a couple of hours and start with something very simple.

Tips for working on a project

• Find the simplest way to do something.  It’ll probably save you render time and you’ll have a better chance of remembering what you did to create the effect you were working on.  You’ll probably learn an easier or better way to do something later.  It’s okay — this is perfectly normal.

• Do everything you can in production to reduce the amount of time you have to spend in post-production.  This can be something as simple as using a fisheye camera rig instead of the default flat camera.

• Keep a calculator handy to convert timecode to frames.  This is especially helpful when you’re trying to align action on the screen with a pre-existing soundtrack.

• If you aren’t comfortable with modelling or are short on time there are models available online.  BlendSwap is a good first stop since the files will all be compatible with Blender.  Other sites like TurboSquid have both free and licensed models but they may not be compatible.  NASA has a small collection of free models.

• Start early on the scenes that you aren’t quite sure how to create.  It sounds counterintuitive, but this gives you more time to finish the scene rather than saving it for last.  The sunset scenes in Cosmic Castaways took me about a year from initial concept to finished product.

• Stuck on a scene?  Take a break.  Work on something else.  Ask for help.

  

• Even if you’re in the middle of a project, never stop looking at tutorials.  Sometimes you’ll find something that is the perfect effect for whatever you’re working on.  The text in the title sequence was created after I found a dissolve text tutorial.

• Save often!  Use descriptive file names when you save if you ever want to be able to find that particularly awesome animation weeks/months/years later.

Remember: “Animate everything!”  If you can think of it, it can probably be animated.

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways. In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made. The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!

In the next series of postings, we will focus on Annie Wilson, our animation guru, who did an enormous amount of work on Cosmic Castaways. Take it away Annie!

About half of the scenes in Cosmic Castaways were rendered using Blender, which is a free and open-source 3D animation suite of programs.  I don’t think it was intentional — it was more of a case of what software would be better suited for each scene.  Almost all of the Blender scenes involved moving around in 3D space, 3D models or creating some sort of effect that wasn’t possible in Adobe AfterEffects.

I have a love/hate relationship with Blender.  If you have the money, I strongly suggest you look into commercial alternatives such as 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave 3D, or Cinema 4D.  I’ve never used any of these programs and cannot recommend one over another.

Love: Blender is great because it’s free, cross platform and open-source which makes it very customizable.  There’s all sorts of resources out there to help you learn or create larger projects, most of which are free.  The community is helpful even if you are a complete newbie.  There’s even a Blender community specifically for planetarians, called Blendertarium!

 Hate: Blender is terrible because of the lack of documentation and the constant updates.  I know updating doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but if you’re in the middle of a large project the last thing you want to do is attempt to learn how a new feature works or hunt for a setting that you need to adjust.  Constant updates also means that the wiki is never complete for each version.  The best you can do is hope that the feature didn’t change significantly from previous versions and someone took the time to document it.

 The user interface is atrocious.  It probably makes sense to a professional or to someone that has worked with other 3D modelling software before, but it makes little sense to the average user.  The number of menu options and buttons can be overwhelming.  The tooltips aren’t always helpful.  You right click to select objects which is opposite from the universal standard.  Blender practically requires one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse due to the overwhelming number of keyboard shortcuts — some of which aren’t even logical.    A numpad isn’t technically required but it is difficult to quickly change views without it.  While that’s not a problem for desktop users it is a problem for laptop users.  Keyboard shortcuts are supposed to help speed up workflow but it defeats the purpose when you keep a list of shortcuts handy.  Oh, and Blender can (and will) crash without notification or even an error message.

Even with all of that, Blender is pretty powerful.  If you know how to use it you can get fairly photorealistic scenes.  Advanced users wanting even more photorealism in their stills will use another program to render and may use Photoshop for post-processing.  

Cherry Blossom by Andrew Price (BlenderGuru), before post-processing

Cherry Blossom by Andrew Price, after post-processing

And if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s not going to be very pretty.

Sunset on alien world (early version) by Annie Wilson

Next up: General advice on using Blender and rendering

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways. In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made. The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!

In the next series of postings, we will focus on Curt Spivey, our planetarium engineer, and the director of Cosmic Castaways. Curt has had a long and varied experience as a planetarium engineer and show producer. Take it away Curt!

5. Work in small bites. After your script is done, read through it and divide it in logical “scenes.” Cosmic Castaways had 18. We then had a storyboard brainstorming session with all the collaborators to decide the general look of each, and then it was up to me as the director to figure out how to make each scene work. I subdivided the soundtrack into 18 sections, and I created a separate AfterEffects project for each scene. After I was satisfied with the scene I would then create a PNG sequence for each, and then I “stacked” each scene in a master AfterEffects project with the final soundtrack before I ran out my PNG domemasters.  “Domemasters” are sequences of still frames in JPEG,  TIFF or PNG formats, that are strung together exactly like old cellulite films were.  We used the PNG format as a compromise between storage size and quality.  JPEGs are smaller, and TIFFs higher quality. The planetarium industry standard is 30 frames per second to create Persistence of Vision, so there are 30 frames for each second of  Cosmic Castaways (that comes out to 35,409 frames.)

The domemasters are important because the more animation you have in a scene, the more likely your computer will screw it up of crash. For a clean final render, you need domemasters, AND because there are so many different planetarium formats out there, domemasters are the best way to distribute your show to other planetarians. Oh, and a very important point I learned the hard way: Always create your domemasters in the LARGEST FORMAT you plan to make available. We have a 1024×1024 pixel system, so I originally made Cosmic Castaways in that size. Much to my chagrin, those domemasters looked like crud blown up to 2048×2048 pixels, so I had to completely redo the show after we started distributing it.

6. George Lucas was right. “A project is never completed, just abandoned.” Cosmic Castaways is like a child. It started as a newborn that we were all excited and proud of. Now it is a freeloading twenty-something without a job that you just want out of your house. My AfterEffects skills have improved exponentially since I began this show, so I could tinker and futz with it from now until doomsday (oh, wait that was in 2012.) Know when it’s time to let go and move on to the next show.

Some other useful tidbits
7. Make DVD copies of your show. We knew we would distribute to planetariums that don’t have fulldome technology. We created a 16:9 version and put it on a DVD with Adobe Encore. My office is also full of DVD cases, blank inserts, blank DVDs and CD labels. I have a photo quality printer and the grant allowed me to get a slick DVD duplicator. Pop in the DVDs and 20 minutes later I’ve got 5 new copies. Woot!

8. International Distribution Will you make the show available to other countries? We are paying someone to create a Spanish translation for us. Figure out what languages you want it in. Make an “Instrumental Only” copy of the soundtrack. If other folks offer to make translations for you, say yes and ask for a recording of the translation in return.

9. Overnight is your friend. My render computer is also my desktop computer, so I usually build my show during the day, and then set it to render as I’m ready to leave for the day. It avoids the “twiddling thumb” syndrome.

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways. In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made. The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!

In the next series of postings, we will focus on Curt Spivey, our planetarium engineer, and the director of Cosmic Castaways. Curt has had a long and varied experience as a planetarium engineer and show producer. Take it away Curt!

3. Your soundtrack is the backbone. My friend Alex Mak at the University of Toledo says it best: “You should be able to listen to and enjoy a soundtrack without a video.” Here is an area I didn’t know anything about before I started this project, but it is something I thoroughly enjoy, and I seem pretty good at. John told me the show became “real” for all of the collaborators when I put together the rough draft soundtrack.

The composer Kevin MacLeod, who created a large fraction of the music used in Cosmic Castaways

Now, I am about to send you “down the rabbit hole” — Ron Proctor at Ott Planetarium put me onto the following FREE source for music: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ by the artist Kevin MacLeod.

You will spend HOURS there sifting and sorting what works for your show. Your music should reflect the mood of the show. I felt for Cosmic Castaways, we needed a lonely, melancholy feel. However, you must walk a fine line – don’t make the music so innocuous you put your audience to sleep, but you also don’t want them guffawing over some super-dramatic music at the wrong place. It is also important not to let your personal taste ruin your soundtrack. I personally have diverse and eclectic musical tastes, from classical to jazz to punk to electronic, but somehow I don’t think The Clash would work in a planetarium show! (Well, maybe someday….)

4. Don’t reinvent the wheel. There are TONS of great computer simulations and astrophotos out there for just about ANY astronomical phenomena. One of our collaborators, Chris Mihos, was one of the first to simulate galactic interactions, and we made good use of his work in our show. John, Pat and Chris had also worked with Frank Summers, who created that fantastic sequence that alternates between Hubble images and computer simulations. I actually saw that before we wrote the script and I knew it had to be part of the show. NASA is a great source – your tax dollars already paid for this stuff, so it’s FREE! Just make sure to get the proper permissions and give proper due in the credits.

In the final post of this series, Curt will give some assorted tips for anyone making their own planetarium shows.

How do you plan  a planetarium show so that is educational and entertaining?  This post by Curt Spivey gives some concepts to pay attention to and how to put an outline together.

A General Outline for a Show

1. Start with a good idea. For me, it makes no sense to make ANOTHER solar system show or ANOTHER black hole show. Cosmic Castaways was a neat topic to work on, and one that you’ll not find in another planetarium show. If you work at or near a university, talk to the astronomers there and find some interesting topic that they specialize in. Astronomy has hundreds of interesting areas to explore.

2. Get the script right. You’ll never be able to match the million dollar graphics of the big production companies. However, no graphics can overcome a poor script! Cosmic Castaways started with John’s public lecture on intracluster light, which the two of us shaped and molded into a rough draft script.


I think my biggest forte is taking complex concepts and explaining them in a way most people can understand. Find simple ways to explain things, and look for good analogies (an example in Cosmic Castaways is “Like a leaf torn from a tree in a windstorm.”) We then lucked out by getting Pamela Gay, the public speaking maestro, to turn our basics into a really strong script. If you don’t have a Pamela Gay, study your favorite shows in your planetarium library and think about what makes those show so good, and also what you DON’T like about them – the term in EPO parlance is that “Jar Jar Binks” moment. Avoid the latter!

In the next post in this series, Curt will talk about the importance of soundtracks in planetarium shows, and not re-inventing the wheel.

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways. In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made. The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!  This post is by Curt Spivey.

Equipment

While we were able to make this show “on the cheap,” it still does take money to get started.

The central component is a REALLY good computer. I will not get into the battle that is Mac vs. PC (and throw in the rebel LINUX faction, too). Since I have been using Windows/ PC machines for most of my career that is what I’m the most comfortable with. No comment regarding the superiority of one over the other. Thanks to the NSF grant that funded the show, I was able to get a GREAT graphics machine. You will need AS MUCH RAM as you possibly can afford (this machine has 32GB.) I also got 2TB of storage, plus another 2TB on a plug in drive. That’s important, because your dome masters will take up a lot of room. Lastly, the best graphics card your machine can support is critical, too. Not as critical are some helpful accessories: A 30” monitor, really good speakers, as many USB 3.0 ports as you can get, and a great set of headphones have all been used a bunch. The machine cost us around $5000.

The show was built and rendered using the Adobe CS5 Suite, which was upgraded to CS6 about halfway through the production. This is your other huge hunk of the production budget. AfterEffects is the backbone that I used to animate and render the show. I started with some great video tutorials from CreativeCow.net, and then my learning curve grew exponentially the more I used it. It helped that I was already a Photoshop Jedi, so I knew the basic way Adobe set up their programs. Photoshop was also a huge help in manipulating images before adding them to AfterEffects. Those of you who like Illustrator will find it invaluable as well – I find that my experience with Photoshop allows me to make stuff better than in Illustrator. That might be different if I played around with Illustrator more, however. Our soundtrack was created using Soundbooth in CS5, which has been replaced by Audition in CS6. Lastly, PremierePro and the Adobe Encoder can be used to produce the final video to run on your system, however we have had fair to good results rendering straight from AfterEffects.

Another small but incredibly useful expense is the Fulldome plugin for AfterEffects from the Navegar Foundation, based in Portugal. U.S. folks can get it from Matt Mascheri at www.Dome3D.com. This product will warp your images so they look right on your dome, both keystoning a rectangular image and spreading something over the whole dome, it is a great timesaver (however it is one of the reasons you’ll need that extra RAM.)

Last, but certainly not least, is a FREE open source program called Blender. I will not detail it here, but Blender is a cumbersome but powerful tool for creating 3D video models from scratch. Annie Wilson will detail this at great length in her blog post.

In the next part of this series, Curt will talk about the general outline for a planetarium show.

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways. In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made. The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!  This set of posts is authored by Curt Spivey.

In the next series of postings, we will focus on Curt Spivey, our planetarium engineer, and the director of Cosmic Castaways.  Curt has had a long and varied experience as a planetarium engineer and show producer.  Here, Curt is talking about his experiences working in different planetariums.  Take it away, Curt!

My Background

I started working in planetariums in 1996 in Charleston, WV. I ran a tiny 24 foot dome that opened in 1962. I had a Spitz A3P (incandescent light source), 4 carousel slide projectors, 1 zoom slew projector (that only focused over a very small portion of the zoom) and 4 single shot “brute force” projectors that could make a panorama over about half of the dome. While I was able to run some Loch Ness and Hayden “classic” slide based prerecorded shows (manually, I might add), my backbone show was What’s Up Tonight, a live star talk.

The important thing here is I honed my narrative doing those star talks. When you are in close quarters with 60 people, you can feel when you have their attention and when they are restless. You keep the jokes and tidbits that work, and quickly discard things that don’t work or confuse. I find a conversational tone; simple explanations and light humor go a long way to your audience’s entertainment. (Naturally, Cosmic Castaways doesn’t have much humor, but I wasn’t the only writer and this particular show didn’t lend itself to gags).

Our museum moved from its little home on the hill to a brand new downtown facility in 2003. Suddenly, I found myself under a 60 foot dome with 175 seats. It used the immensely complicated ElectricSky I system from Spitz that covered the dome with forward panorama video, slide all sky projectors and the Space Voyager starball behemoth. It was also a large format film theater (what most common folks know as OMNIMAX, but our projector was by a company called Megasystems).

Here I learned what constitutes a good prerecorded show, both from the planetarium and the films we ran. Make your point, emphasize with stunning imagery, well placed humor and awe, and make it pithy. Oh, yeah – the eSky I system was so cludgy that I also got very good at improvising while trying to correct technical errors. The system went down about every week or so due to various failings.

My final stop before Youngstown was Hickory, NC where I opened a brand new fulldome planetarium in 2007. The Catawba Science Center built a 30 foot dome with 65 seats, featuring the Konica Minolta MediaGlobe II system and an AVI Skylase Laser system. Quite an elegant setup.

In Hickory I learned the art of full dome immersion – using the faux 3D feel of a fulldome to transport the audience to new experiences. Nearly as importantly, I met Ron Proctor and was introduced to the power of the software known as Blender to create original shows.

All that experience made me an attractive candidate to the Ward Beecher Planetarium who brought me back to my native state in 2009.

In the next part of this series, Curt will talk about the hardware and software needed to create Cosmic Castaways.

Science on the Half Sphere’s first full-length planetarium show is Cosmic Castaways.  In this series of posts, we will talk about how the show was made.  The goal is to help other people interested in making full-dome planetarium shows see what we did, and hopefully avoid our mistakes!