Planetarium Star Projectors

[SpitzSTP]

A little off-topic but cannot resist posting about a Clausing drill press I recently fetched from a surplus dealer in New Mexico. His semi trailers and buildings stuffed with artifacts from various Los Alamos-type auctions. I am always curious about the history of things, this one has an inventory tag "E G & G Special Projects Division".

So I got to wondering who E G & G is, and what exactly "Special Projects" meant and discovered that during the 1950s and 1960s, EG&G was involved in nuclear tests as a major contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission. EG&G made extensive use of the Nevada Test Site (NTS) for weapons development and high-technology military testing at Nellis AFB. They were involved in contracting services to the United States government during World War II and conducted weapons research and development after the war... (i.e., nukes) involvement with some of the government's most sensitive technologies ... cited in conspiracy theories related to Department of Defense black projects... dot dot dot

EG&G "Special Projects" also referred to activity at Area 51. According to Wikipedia, EG&G's "Special Projects" division was the notable operator of the Janet Terminal at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, NV, a service used to transport employees to remote government locations in Nevada and California! Really? Fascinating, as Spock would say. If this tool could talk.. Now it will help build optical tables for laser projectors, with any luck.

The tool itself is a Clausing 15 with a Procunier tapping attachment that runs on compressed air. These are super good drill presses and definitely made in USA. It weighs about 350 pounds and was probably made in the 60's. This all leads me to conclude that these dudes needed to tap a few holes for a black project or two.

http://area51specialprojects.com/specialprojects.html
http://area51looseends.blogspot.com/...ty-manual.html
http://www.dreamlandresort.com/info/janet.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NTPbA4x-9w

OK wait, there's more! ... product of net surfing at 3 am on EG&G Special Projects:

One of the first employees of the new company (EG&G)was Bernard J. O’Keefe, another MIT graduate who had worked for Dr. Grier during the war. O’Keefe served with the 21st Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands during the war, and is said to have personally wired the bomb that later destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

EG&G was involved in the U.S. effort to build a more powerful nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. That year, Grier and O’Keefe were present at a Nevada test site to personally witness an H-bomb detonation. After the weapon failed to explode, Grier and O’Keefe flipped a coin to determine who should scale the 300-foot test tower and disarm the bomb. Although O’Keefe lost, he won the special distinction of being the first man to disarm a live H-bomb.

[catalanjo]

Fascinating story .... Thanks!
Hey that press looks a bit like my drill stand .....just a lot better!
Cheers

[masterpj]

I'm on my phone so searching is hard but I have not yet seen one of these planetarium star projector systems running in a video or so. Are there any videos out there of one running?

[flecom]

I think that is where Flecom ran laser shows.

yep, as of 8/30 it will never light again

[SpitzSTP]

I'm on my phone so searching is hard but I have not yet seen one of these planetarium star projector systems running in a video or so. Are there any videos out there of one running?

I hope I can get swami to take some video clips over here someday as photography is not my strongest skill. DZ dropped by here the other day and got the Minolta MS-10 rolling again after being frozen in position for 7 years. DZ worked on this exact same instrument when it was commissioned to P-H-M Planetarium in Indiana many years ago and now restores it to full operation here in Phoenix where it now casts its diamonds in the sky. Wow that's all I got to say after seeing the stars now rotate, and the sun moon and planets spin by, and the moon even goes through its phases. The date calendar readout on the control panel still read 2007 the year it was removed from service, and the day DZ was here we ran it forward 62 years and experienced a sort of time-travel to the future. Swami and Karl helped me build my first RGB this summer, shown here running Darkside in the middle of the day. AVI shows now run without water-cooled argon, eliminating the issue of scorpions getting inside because water lines running out to the back yard through the sliding glass door. Thanks to DZ this Minolta is flying missions again

[swamidog]

happy to. I took a bunch of still shots from when dz and I were there, but we need some stars and lasers video.

I hope I can get swami to take some video clips over here someday as photography is not my strongest skill. DZ dropped by here the other day and got the Minolta MS-10 rolling again after being frozen in position for 7 years. DZ worked on this exact same instrument when it was commissioned to P-H-M Planetarium in Indiana many years ago and now restores it to full operation here in Phoenix where it now casts its diamonds in the sky. Wow that's all I got to say after seeing the stars now rotate, and the sun moon and planets spin by, and the moon even goes through its phases. The date calendar readout on the control panel still read 2007 the year it was removed from service, and the day DZ was here we ran it forward 62 years and experienced a sort of time-travel to the future. Swami and Karl helped me build my first RGB this summer, shown here running Darkside in the middle of the day. AVI shows now run without water-cooled argon, eliminating the issue of scorpions getting inside because water lines running out to the back yard through the sliding glass door. Thanks to DZ this Minolta is flying missions again

[SpitzSTP]

happy to. I took a bunch of still shots from when dz and I were there, but we need some stars and lasers video.

Copy that. space dude. was flying out past the Kuiper Belt last night, stopped at this place, ran some abstracts for about an hour, then moved on.

[SpitzSTP]

The Spitz 512 from Kansas Cosmosphere is assembled and mounted to a custom roller base along with its instrument modifier assembly. Two more roller bases are ready, constructed of two layers of 2 x 6 glued together in a cross-hatch pattern with super-duty roller bearing casters. The machines can be moved around and configured in clusters. The Coherent I-200 behemoth is going up on to the high shelf for display purposes, where most normal folk are supposed to put some sort of clay pots or something. This thing is really heavy and the gantry comes in handy. Two more instruments are ready to assemble; another Spitz 512 from Evansville, Indiana and another Spitz model A4 from the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Karl and Swami assisted last summer with building the RGB projector which runs some canned shows copied from another system. Another recent project has been to hot rod a few of these little "laser Stars" projectors with help from another PL'er by putting higher power laser diodes in them and amping them way the h*ll up. Instead of the dim green stars from the stock units as purchased, these throw a blaze of very bright colored, moving stars above, like fiery space diamonds. A recent order to DTR and we have quite an assortment of different color diodes to play with for these projectors, with plans to mod at least three more. It was fun to open these units up and swap out some components. All high windows in the house now have to be covered completely as these stars pass easily through the glass and appear on the sides of the neighbor's houses, which must be prevented.

http://www.amazon.com/Can-You-Imagin...ds=laser+stars

[SpitzSTP]

The problem of scorpions getting inside during the laser shows has been solved. Water feed is taken from the faucet outside to bypass the water softener and the drain goes to the sunflower patch in the back yard.

[SpitzSTP]

GOTO model S-2 only two known to exist in the USA, this one came from Laser Lake Observatory in Iowa. Two of the knobs spin freely without doing anything which is an easy fix after seeing the variac shaft linkage from below. The set screws just need to be tightened up. The star brightness rheostat was stubbornly frozen in time. A little bit of penetrating oil and gentle coaxing and the shaft turns smooth as silk now. The carbon brushes are still in good shape also. Planets, fixed stars, meridian, day glow, moon glow and Milky Way aux projectors are working, can really test it much better after it gets dark. The hand-written number 6 inside the cast metal base is probably the factory serial number. The stars in the background of the last photo are all laser generated on the adjoining room using higher power diodes from DTR. 445nm stars are in the works. The S-2 is creating a room full of optical stars, sun, moon and planets but my cam is not good enough at low light levels to do them justice. I had enough stuff on this evening to trip several circuit breakers on the main panel.

If you zoom in you can see what appears to be galaxies tilted on edge similar to Hubble seep space telescope images although admittedly not nearly as clear but quite convincing to the mind's eye, though mine a tad too heavy on the red until more blue, and other colors are added.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/...se/pr2004016c/