renderings of completed installation

The Global Immersion folks have gone home for the holidays, but they left some nice presents! Being computer graphics oriented, of course they left….. RENDERINGS! Have a look at some of these glorious pixels… And glance at this TOP VIEW! A simulated image on our Spitz Nano Seam Dome screen. Of course, this blog is [...]

Brightening the Image

The amount of light on the screen doubled tonight, as light from the first 8.2 Kilowatt lamp was joined by a second lamp. Soon 2 more lamps will be brightening our dome. When completed, the total amount of power used in this complex projection system will be 32.4 Kilowatts. Several folks have asked us who [...]

The First Image on the Heikoff Dome Screen.

After Thursday night exciting first light, Friday we got another first: The first Image! Of course, being engineers obsessed with getting the largest and brightest possible image  on our enormous screen, the first image is a test pattern. This image is a sort of polar grid, like the lines of latitude and longitude that cover [...]

First Light from the projectors at 2:10 am on 12-8-11

A significant moment in the life of an instrument is the moment when light first flows through it. Our First Light on Phase 2 occurred at 2:10 am on 12-8-11. Matt Roberts carefully monitored the lamps performance and did preliminary work on the lenses after the lamps were switched on. Perhaps a small thing, none [...]

Mounting the SONY Projectors

On November 30th, the Heikoff Dome Theater was closed for one of the VERY few times in the 29 years I have worked here. The occasion was the installation of four SONY SRXT420 Projectors on the projector stands that had been installed in past few days. Each projector weighed in at 400 pounds, and they [...]