Digital Daze #4

This time around, I don't have anything digital to talk about, but this title is sticking so I thought I'd keep it.

A while ago at Hansen Planetarium, we installed an effect made primarily out of fiber optics. It was probably what some of many of you have done with other various lighting sources. I just thought I would share this particular one with you.
We arranged to get many hundreds of feet of stranded fiber, for an Earth at Night effect that we needed for our Cosmic Catastrophes show in 1991. At the time all that I was aware of was that this took a lot of time and money to do. I was not exactly sure how much we spent on the fibers, but time, well it took 2 1/2 weeks to put in, with 3 people working on it. Here is what we did.

First, we had to bundle the fibers into stranded cables. Then, we had to place them precisely through the holes in the dome, so that they would match the city lights of a projected image of the Earth at Night. The strands then had to travel about 10-12 feet to where the one projector was resting. This took up the many lengths and thus cost us much more. We covered the eastern coast, Europe, Africa, and South America. It was by far the most elaborate effect I had ever seen. As time went on, we wanted to do the same thing with a galaxy. We did. It was twice as much time and money to get it all done. Later, we did it again in 1995, for our version of Destination. We did Mars at Night, and created our version of a technological civilization on the night side of Mars, sort of a Lowellian Mars highway system with cities. We use less fiber optics but still it took a lot of time and money.

The point of this is this. When I moved to Georgia and the CCSSC, yes once again, I was pushing for the same effect in a show. We did not have the same size budget though and we had to make due. Steve Armstrong put together something that drastically cut back the cost and time to install this effect. We bought 200 feet of 64 strand bundled fiber optics. We built 3-4 boxes that where about 3in x 5in x 1.5in with a low power lamp at one end and a reflector. A hole with clamping mechanism is positioned at the other end, for the fibers. We cut 2 pairs of the fiber cable ranging from 12 inches to 36 inches at 6 inch intervals, giving us 10 cables of 64 fibers, all bundled into this clamp on the box. We were able to take this box and attach it easily to the dome. By bringing the light source to the region of the image rather than getting more fibers to take them to a light source, it really cut down the costs. Also, since the extra fibers for travel distance had been eliminated, there was less confusion installing the effect.

We did make one more refinement while doing this in Georgia. One thing that happened at Hansen is that some of the fibers stuck through too far as a result of drift over time and tape loosing its stick. This caused, from certain other projection devices, a shadow on the dome. At the CCSSC, we fixed it by bending the tips of the fibers a little, making them look like the letter L. We then stuck only that bootom part of the through the dome, instead of the whole fiber, thus limiting how far they actually fall through, and then getting rid of the shadow problem.

Well, there you have it. Not too amazing but maybe someone else can take yet another step. I would really like to know if anyone has done anything like this yourselves, the pro's and con's and such, what works and what doesn’t.