Boston Planetarium Lasershow
I wasn't quite sure where I should put this post, its not really a product review, more of a show review. Maybe another forum for show reviews would be neat, or maybe just overcomplicate things with too many forums and too few posts. Anyway, I just wanted to post the experience I had visiting the Museum of Science planetarium. The theater is called the Charles Hayden Planetarium. I had suspected when visiting thier website, www.mos.org that they might have had an AVI Omniscan laser projector and I was right! If you have a planetarium in your area that has an Omniscan, you really should take some time to enjoy a show. For those that don't know, the Omniscan is capable of projecting anywhere on the dome from the center of the room, so you can sorta consider its scan angle to be 180 degrees all the way around (180 x 360 degrees). If anyone has the opportunity to visit the Boston area, visiting this theater is definately worth the trip! The star projector (planetarium) they use is a Zeiss Mark VI, which is a monster, and is all of about 38 years old. I only had time to watch a few laser shows and was unable to watch a star show though it certainly looked like they were a well equipped theater. The shows I saw were Laser U2, Laser Metallica and PF Dark Side. Laser U2 was good and Laser Metallica was awesome! Sadly though, the PF DS show was rather lacking. It looks like that show was in house produced and had no where near the artistic value that either of the other shows had. The other thing I noticed, is that no matter how awesome the Omniscan isat projecting laser images, I felt it could have been much much better with a compliment of beam projectors.
So it kinda got me thinking. In the planetarium world, theaters can be broken up into 6 different "specifications". Called the L-H-S Level Specification (Loch Ness Productions, Joe Hopkins Engineering and Sky-Skan). This specification level defines a theaters capability. So why not have a similar scheme in the laser world? IE- Say a "level 1" laser show would include only beams from a projector that has no scanning capability, a "level 2" uses only scanned beams but has no graphics capability and so on. Thoughts? Maybe this would be just a waste of time?
David
