Need a high resolution, equirectangular projections of a celestial sphere full of stars? NASA GSFC has ’em – plus constellation stick figures, IAU boundaries, and a celestial coordinate grid.
Tip of the hat to Kevin Scott at E&S who posted this on the Fulldome email list.
cgskies.com boasts over 300 panoramic high dynamic range (HDR) sky scenes. Most of these are, naturally, daytime or sunset scenes, and have resolutions up to 15k pixels wide. I haven’t tried them out in our dome, but they look promising for use in fulldome!
Also check out their resources page for tutorials and links to software to convert cylindrical equirectangular panoramas to other projections.
Make sure to look over their terms of use before purchasing images for use in your productions. (Not that there’s anything there that should be a concern; it’s just always a good habit.)
The official Adobe After Effects Twitter feed recently pointed to this gem on YouTube: Terry Gilliam in his Monty Python days, showing how he creates his animations. Great advice from Gilliam about five minutes in: know the limitations of the medium and use them to your advantage. If you can’t animate every little natural movement, embrace that and make it part of your style.
A few weeks ago I found a good deal on a fisheye lens made for a variety of smaller digital cameras. It was $50 at Amazon, but now I look and see it’s actually unavailable there now. But it’s still available on the manufacturer’s web site for $60:
The package comes with the lens itself, plus the appropriate adapter, which you can select from the web site.
A few sample photos from my first outing with the lens. Click for full-sized, unaltered photos. They probably could have been better than this, had I experimented more with ISO and manual focus. And, uh, brought a tripod.
My Canon Powershot is capable of a maximum of 3264 x 2448 resolution stills, so no it’s not going to cover a 4K dome in perfect crisp resolution, especially after you crop out the blurry extreme edges and the flat top and bottom. But depending on the scene you might just be able to get away with it anyway. Many 2K images look just fine on our 4K dome.
Note that nowhere on the web site, in the packaging, or on the lens itself does it say anything about the actual optical specifications, other than it is “0.20X”. Also, the lens barrel will probably block the flash.
But, a nice advantage is that the camera and lens together are compact and lightweight and not a burden to casually carry around. Take it scouting for cool shots and then come back with the DSLR when you pick the shots you want.
“There are eight ways to put a slide in a slide projector. Seven of them are wrong.” — traditional planetarium wisdom
There aren’t really too many ways to make the visuals for a slide-based planetarium show. Take some photos, make some art, and turn it all into 35mm slides. Make sure the backgrounds are nice and dark, and arrange it all in slide projectors to make it look good. Special effects and video if you’ve got it. Add in some programming for whatever automation system you happen to have (or just turn the knobs and dials yourself live), and you have a show.
I’m clearly oversimplifying, and it’s not as if any of those individual steps are actually simple in practice. Producing a slide-based show can take a lot of work and experience. But the path you take to get there is pretty clear and not too different from dome to dome: somewhere along the way, someone has to make some slides.
But then there’s fulldome. How many ways are there to put pixels on a dome? Think about that one for a minute. Yikes.
You’ve got your realtime systems. Digistar, Sky-Skan, Mediaglobe, Digitarium. Pre-rendered? You’ve got Adobe After Effects, with fulldome warping plugins from at least three or four different suppliers. Going full-blown 3D modelling? Maya, Lightwave, 3ds Max, Blender? Then how does it get to the dome? Six or more projectors? Two? One in the center, or one aimed at a curved mirror? So many options, so little time and such tiny budgets! How can such a far flung group like us planetarians hope to learn from each other, especially when there are so many different paths to choose?
That’s where this site comes in: my goal is to bring together tips, tricks, and tutorials to anyone interested in planetarium show production, regardless of the technology. In order for this site to succeed, I need your help. Yeah, you. If you’ve got something to share, tell me about it! Video tutorials, project files, just some general wisdom? All is fair game – even tips for, yes, slide production, or hints on improving your live star talk.
More coming soon!
Drew
P.S. Don’t try to think too hard about the name Newton’s Cannon. I bought the domain name years before I had any idea what to do with it. I saw it was available and had to own it. I’m still a physics geek at heart.