#PLANETARIUM PROJECTOR HOW TO#
#PLANETARIUM PROJECTOR FULL#

Packing cardboard comes in a few different thicknesses - mine was ⅛″. Jeff Adkins’ site gives some other ideas for where to obtain cardboard. The bundle cost a little under $200, but the convenience of having clean blank sheets of a regular size was worth a lot. Eventually I gave up and ordered 4′x8′ sheets of corrugated packing cardboard from a packing supply store. Where do you get that much cardboard? I tried finding scrap cardboard from retail stores, thinking that they receive shipments in cardboard boxes, but few places receive goods in boxes with large enough sides. For a dome roughly 12 feet across, all 50 pieces need to be roughly 3-4 feet on a side.

His description of his original dome is here.) Preparing the Cardboard Panelsįor the dome and wall, you need to cut 40 triangles and 10 rectangles out of cardboard. It looked like this: A Geodesic Cardboard Dome To make the dome on which to project the sky, the students and I constructed a 12′ diameter geodesic dome from cardboard triangles, painted white on the inside, held together by large binder clips pinching flaps along the edge of each triangle, and lifted off the ground a couple of feet by a wall of cardboard rectangles. We bought nearly all of our supplies new - you may be able to build a planetarium for less, depending on how resourceful you are. We already owned a digital projector, and the expense for the rest of the supplies was under $400. The rest of this article is a description of how we did it. This enabled me to control the stars, the sun, the planets, and even the blue daytime glow. Many years ago, my students and I built a planetarium dome out of cardboard, and I projected the nighttime sky onto it with a personal computer, a digital projector, and a mirror. A planetarium of your own could be a fantastic teaching tool for observational astronomy.

It would be much better for you, the teacher, to take control of the star projector, and to be able to point out all the constellations one by one, to show their gradual drift through the sky by speeding up the motion, to show the daily and annual motions of the sun and moon through the sky, and to show the motions of the planets among the stars.

#PLANETARIUM PROJECTOR FULL#

In my experience, you basically get an IMAX movie, and a minute or two devoted to the star projector, completely neglecting the teaching potential of having full control over an artificial sky. One daytime option is a field trip to a planetarium, but very seldom do planetaria take full advantage of the educational possibilities of a star projector. Homeschoolers and small groups might be able to make a pretty good go of things by arranging special night-time observing sessions, but this isn’t normally feasible for larger schools. You are normally teaching indoors during the daytime, and to show students Leo or Scorpius, you need to be outdoors at night. One of the main difficulties in familiarizing students with the nighttime sky is that you don’t have convenient access to it, and to your students, at the same time.

#PLANETARIUM PROJECTOR HOW TO#

How to make a home planetarium using cardboard, a mirror, and a digital projector.

Planetarium projector