I love a good planetarium projector. I got to use the one in the Kalamazoo planetarium back in the late 70's. It was a lot of fun. A much simpler Spitz design, compared to the marvelous Zeiss projector on your postcard. Ours had a simple dodecahedral star ball that used pinhole projection, rather than the multiple lens projectors on the Zeiss. The cylindrical "cages" that support the two star balls would hold the individual planet projectors. They were geared to electric motors that allowed them to simulate the night-to-night motions of the planets. Other auxilliary projectors would project the milky way, constellation figures, comets, meteors, the sun and moon, and who knows what else. Nowadays it's all done in software, and it's nowhere near as cool.
They were really fantastic machines, and I really hope there are a good number of them still in use.
Somehow you put me in mind of kind of enjoying having to put quarters in a mechanical parking meter yesterday. It felt all retro. Physical. Machine-ly.
I wonder if the addition of electricity used to feel like the addition of a computer to car parts did and now the addition of an internetly component does.
I love your description of how the Spitz worked. And yeah, totally more cool when a big contraption in the middle of the room was doing its own rotations and twistations to give us that dome of celestial stuff.
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They were really fantastic machines, and I really hope there are a good number of them still in use.
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I wonder if the addition of electricity used to feel like the addition of a computer to car parts did and now the addition of an internetly component does.
I love your description of how the Spitz worked. And yeah, totally more cool when a big contraption in the middle of the room was doing its own rotations and twistations to give us that dome of celestial stuff.