Zeiss CEO Michael Kaschke (left) and Wolfgang Heckl, director general of Deutsches Museum
ZEISS “Visitors can cover the
Historic German planetarium lit up by futuristic tech
W
hen Munich’s Deutsches Museum celebrated the opening of its new planetarium in late February 2015, it was relying on two
unique technologies provided by Zeiss. The German company installed the high-performance projection system for the 15-metre dome, which holds 160 visitors. It consists of Zeiss’ classical opto-mechanical star projector, Skymaster ZKP4, synchronised with its six channel digital fulldome system, Velvet. The new system has a lot to live up to – the world’s fi rst projection planetarium went into operation at the Deutsches Museum 90 years ago on 7 May 1925. “Skymaster is equipped with fi bre-optic projectors for the projection of the starry
©CYBERTREK 2015 AM 2 2015
13.7 billion light years to the edges of the visible universe in just 10 minutes”
sky, including fi xed stars, nebulas, star clusters and other deep sky objects. Each of the thousands of fi xed stars and each sky object is provided by one single optical fi bre, using LED illumination systems as light sources,” says Wilfried Lang, vice pres- ident at Carl Zeiss, Planetarium Division. The combination of LED and fi bre-optics
provides a starry sky that’s as natural as possible, because of both the brightness of the stars and the high colour temperature. “The Velvet fulldome system, due to the absolute black image background, fi ts ideally to this starry sky avoiding any greyish frame behind the image content.” Lang says it’s only the patented Velvet projector, with its extremely high on/off
contrast ratio (2,500,000:1), that can deliver this performance – a good thing considering the Deutsches Museum will use the dome for teaching astronomy, with four to six public shows per day. “An advantage we have is the sharpness of the images because of the so-called checkerboard contrast, which is four times higher than standard video projectors,” he says. “That’s why Velvet is able to separate a white from a black pixel with a sharp line in between, aided by our specially developed lenses for this projector.” The result is that an image with the same number of pixels will appear much sharper with Velvet – a 2K Velvet projector is at least as sharp as any standard 4K projector, Lang says. This means a lower computer capacity can achieve the same result. At the Deutsches Museum, Zeiss tech-
nology offers a plethora of opportunities. It can show not only illuminated dots, but also images and entire shows, and Lang says even virtual journeys through space are possible. Visitors can cover the 13.7 billion light years to the edges of the visible uni- verse in just 10 minutes, fl y by the planets of our solar system, or view the Milky Way from the outside in incredible detail.
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PHOTO: ZEISS
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