Its Out There - Somewhere Everything surely has strengths and weaknesses. You buy a car, you don’t love everything about it. You compromise right? Relationships in life are like that .. You take a few bad things to get the really good things. I love my new iphone but there are a few things …. I’d change. Well the same is true for star balls. Building a planetarium isn’t like a home theater it seems. There, you get the projector, the screen, the popcorn machine, ROLL THEM .. Its done. A home planetarium, at least the HPA way, not so much. After a few years I have 4 star balls rolling round the place. I didn’t set out to have four. I’d really like six. Give me time. But they aren’t all the same. Not all star balls are created equal. This isn’t marriage. We can have more than one partner. You need one you built. From scratch if you would be a HPAer. Maybe not a a main ball, but at least some tin cans or PVC should be lurking somewhere in the theater. The pros used to be this way, before the digital curse I MEAN revolution. Look at old IPS guides, they were using tin cans, slide projectors, aluminum foil. Not anymore. A lost and dying art. You need to have put in some time on one. Maybe you don’t use this one so much with an audience. But maybe once in awhile you do, and you talk about what you made more than the stars it produces. The old commercial balls. The hybrids, old ball new mounting. They will all excell in SOMETHING. And they will all be not so good at something. Maybe that Dodecahedron shows the southern stars so well . Maybe the Spitz A3P has a detailed Milky Way that you just cant build ever. Maybe the home cylinder you bought just has more stars because a guy in Arizona spent 2 years drilling them in. Maybe you can have a greatest cylinder hits show for a single group of people. You will surely be tempted to build multiple domes to house them. Hopefully you’ll come to your senses on that one! But you will see the good and the not so good in each. Some of those Orions don’t look real. This one has an amazing Big Dipper. That one, I can’t even see Scorpio. Keep building, collecting, tweaking. You still don’t have a really good Andromeda Nebula. But its out there.. Somewhere. ….