Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/03/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 12:13 AM 3/27/2007, Mark Rabiner wrote: >Zeiss is Nice. > >Down the street is the Zeiss Mark IX projector at the Hayden planetarium. >I'm going to check it out Friday. >Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford do the narration. >They couldn't get any big stars. In the late 1930's, Carl Zeiss Jena supplied its then state-of-the-art planetarium projectors to a bunch of US facilities -- Hayden in New York, Buhl in Pittsburgh, Griffith in the City of Lost Angels, and to Chicago and Philadelphia and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. These projectors were monsters of mechanical complexity and required a staff of on-call watchmakers to keep them in tune. Over the past fifteen years, all of these projectors have been junked: the ones from Buhl and Griffith and Philadelphia have simply disappeared and may well have gone to the scrap heap despite efforts to at least preserve them as museum exhibits. Hayden was the only one to replace the old CZJ projector with the modern Carl Zeiss model. The others all seem to have opted for Japanese ones and not even the quality Goto projectors but, rather, slimey ones which can, as the Director of Buhl said, "give really neat laser rock-shows" as if that is the rationale behind why you have a planetarium in the first place. Idolatry! Hayden is to be praised for their dedication to the central goal of scientific education. They use to have a register when you entered where you could sign up for your ticket to the Moon when these became commercially available. I signed up in 1959, and I'm still waiting .... Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!