I've got planetarium projectors - just saying that sounds a bit crazy, like 'I race lawn mowers', or I built a drum set out of trash cans or something. But I do - and how they came into my possession is the subject of this post. Whats a planetarium projector? Some kind of magic lantern that creates an illusion of the heavens few people have even seen anymore, the stars from a remote dark location. I wanted to be able to conjure them any old day, since the variables that have to line up for me to 1) get far enough from a city 2) get a clear moonless night 3) look up are like some sort of cosmic slot machine. But now I have the ability.
In my 40's, I had forgotten my planetarium beginnings. That's not to say I didn't visit commercial ones on occasion - when my father had moved us to the Chicago area in 62 and I found myself on the lakefront knocking on the door of this big place called Adler, I had been hooked. Before they showed movies and lasers like now, they used to just show the stars. I liked them. So back in those wonder years, those years of pinewood derby style cars, homemade skateboards and stilts, superballs and stromberg race sets - of course I built a planetarium projector. I even found a kid down the street who was interested. We had little telescopes, but my mom brought home cakes in these white cake boxes, and I took one one time and poked some holes in it with a safety pin. I had this flashlight bulb on a wire with a battery pack - so I could go into a darkened bedroom and project little stars up on the ceiling. Then this particular fever slept many many years, until those 40's. Then it woke up.
I picked up the Starry Messenger want ads one day, and there was an ad for a 'drilled starball'. The check wrote itself. Soon I was gazing at an earth globe painted blue with a couple hundred tiny star holes expertly drilled in it from a man named Dick Emmons, North Canton, Ohio. From this I build my first homemade star projector. It changed my life, or resumed that life of long ago in Villa Park outside Chicago. Once again, I could see stars. The fever was back.
The Emmons projector was eventually donated to the Planetarium Museum in Big Bear Lake CA, where even today it hobnobs with commercial dinosaurs of another era. I didn't need it anymore because lightning struck again. My 'Starry Messenger' came through a second time, when the Steve Smith Copper Cylinder came up for sale. This time I remembered it - I had read about it in Sky and Telescope as a youth, eating my chicken TV dinner I think it was, and I was enthralled. I did whatever it took to get it back to Gallatin, which wasn't easy - a 72 hour round trip to Douglas AZ and back. This amazing cylinder with its 80 lenses, knotty pine mounting box, was the stuff of legend to ME. It projected a breaktaking night sky in my little dome. But it needed a bigger dome to do it justice. There are things in life that as soon as you get one, you need a bigger one. Domes were the case, and here was the reason. I entered Dome Purgatory again and began the tortuous journey already spoken of in the larger theater out back. The Smith cylinder was mounted at least four different ways - it was used in its fork and out of its fork - its original light source eventually replaced with a self contained unit, necessitating an access door. It acquired a dent it was moved around so much . but each new light position - each new orientation revealed new wonders in the sky drilled into this piece of soft metal. It was truly a thing of dreams, and remains thus to this day.
There would be a third 'classic' planetarium projector to come to my farm, I purchased from Steve Pielock an old Spitz A2, the original American commercial workhorse planetarium and to this day I haven't done it justice. Too large and ungainly to use in my small theaters, I have savored it in pieces rather than as a whole. The dodecahedron is a curiosity more than a usuable starball - the desk has fallen apart, and the control desk resembles the controls of a WWII submarine. Its just cool to have around, a reminder of 50's technology that just felt solid. Perhaps it has some role yet to be determined. Sometimes we acquire things just to look at them and to feel how solid they are. Such is the case with my Spitz A2.
About the time I stopped buying classic homemade and commercial planetarium projectors, Alan Clutter was good enough to donate a Spitz A3 starball to me out of the blue - or the black. A former employee of Spitz, this gentleman had found a ball never used and it has become a cherished part of my collection, and it is rotated in and out of my theater for certain sky renditions. It has a purity of light in its Milky Way which is quite endearing, and although it too has been so many places it now sports a few signs of wear, this is an invaluable member of my home planetarium team.
There are things however, that live on the border of memory - if we're lucky, some of these dimly stalk us from our childhood and never really go away. Such was one planetarium 'toy' for me, dubbing it 'the holy grail' of planetarium toys from the 50's on would not prove to be overwrought - the Renwal Cosmorama was one of those dawning space age things that for me brought back an intoxicating swirl of Gilbert chemistry sets, Mr Machines and Pikes Peak Hill Climb road races right out of the bible of any 60's kid - the Sears Christmas catalog. The Renwal Cosmorama was a plastic half dome, a tiny star projector, and some incomprehensible yet cool 'controls' that really had little practical value, but for a boomer astro nerd it was the ultimate. Finding one finally and being able to barter for it rather than pay some outlandish price for it remains a top 5 of alltime for my home planetarium career. There were other toys, most notable the Spitz Junior projectors of the 50s and an unending parade of toy projectors since, but nothing could touch the Cosmorama. I began customizing it immediately.
But wasn't there something missing in my home planetarium projector cannon? I had started the Home Planetarium Association in the 90's, done 20 or more newsletters and countless online posts on BUILDING home planetariums, yet I hadn't actually BUILT one since that cakebox in Chicago .. I started as Emmons did with Earth globes - two of my prototypes were sold and never heard from again, one to Seattle and one to Texas - these perfected the main problem of pinhole projection, the fact that starholes in globes tend to close back up, by substituting star plates made of vinyl or thin metal. I had built a couple school projectors though to this day I haven't followed them up .. yet. But I wanted something more, something I could use in my own dome .. something of mine - I couldn't take credit for the Emmons or the Smith or the Spitz. I needed my own. But how?
And then a plastic construction barrel turned up. I don't know where it came from, it was just there and the Likert Star Cylinder was created, shamelessly lifting the star patterns off the Smith. Yet here was something new, I put the lenses INSIDE, retaining that smooth outer cylinder surface - indeed the projector resembled a large wedding cake. I was able to finally live up to my name as a builder, finding a cheap solution to lenses and really building the heavens out of nothing but miscellaneously parts. It was done and now my collection seemed complete.
All four projectors, the Smith, the Likert, the A2 and the A3 (along with the Cosmorama) are here now, and the Emmons is enshrined. While I cannot rule out further additions, this seems to be the starting lineup for spreading the news about the heavens beauty in my remaining years on the planet.
