Realistic Scintillation of All Stars

The earth's atmosphere interferes with the light coming from the stars. As a result, the stars twinkle or, in scientific terms, scintillate. The simulation of this phenomenon has always challenged planetarium designers, but none of them arrived at a perfect solution. Artificial scintillation either followed a fixed pattern (which was visible), or used special twinkle projectors for the brightest stars only. Frequently, when the scintillation mechanism was switched off again, many stars remained at a reduced brightness or were invisible.

For the first time, the Zeiss fiber projector allows a realistic scintillation effect to be produced for all stars. We use the statistical distribution of fiber positions to simulate the random atmospheric twinkling. The effect is stunning, because it is next to indistinguishable from the natural phenomenon. Unlike in earlier solutions, the effect can be switched off without the risk of stars ending up dimmed down or blacked out.

Twinkling Included The innovative scintillation device is arranged between the illuminator and the bundled fibers. A special structure causes brightness variations, which the fibers transmit to the star masks. Due to the random distribution of the fibers, the brightness variations are visible on the dome as natural scintillation.

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