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	New Stars from Carl Zeiss for the Hamburg Planetarium		Downloads and Links
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	HAMBURG/Germany, 04.11.2003. The stars of the Hamburg planetarium are now sparkling with new brilliance. On October 22, 2003, one of the most venerable planetarium institutions in Germany reopened its doors to the public after comprehensive revamping and the installation of a UNIVERSARIUM Mark IX projector from Carl Zeiss. "This is a fantastic instrument. Hamburg will boast the best night sky in the world," said Thomas Kraupe, Director of the Hamburg Planetarium, during his visit to Carl Zeiss Jena for the factory acceptance test. Visitors will experience an artificial sky which equals its natural counterpart in every way. In cities, in particular, where streetlights and neon signs outshine the stars, the projection planetarium is gaining increasing importance. When displayed in its full splendor in the planetarium, the night sky is a source of a never-ending fascination for the audience. Artificial stars have been shining in the Hamburg planetarium since 1930. The new UNIVERSARIUM is the fourth planetarium projector from Carl Zeiss to be put into service here. With scarcely any resemblance to its predecessors, it provides top-level performance. Never have the stars sparkled with such brightness and brilliance on the 21 m dome. For the first time, artificial stars are really point-shaped, and the apparent "spike-like" appearance of bright stars is made visible. In earlier times, the audience first had to get used to the darkness in the dome. Today, the stars can even be discerned in room lighting. Details such as the scintillation of stars or the fine, nearly invisible crescent of the moon in the immediate vicinity of the sun are reproduced with amazing realism. It is now almost 80 years to the day since the inception of the modern projection planetarium. On October 21, 1923, a planetarium projector from Carl Zeiss projected artificial stars onto a dome in the German Museum in Munich for the first time. To this day, the projector - a combination of precision optics and precision engineering - has remained unsurpassed in the emotional impact it exerts on visitors of the planetarium. With the UNIVERSARIUM, Hamburg once again possesses the world's most state-of-the-art planetarium projector. The predecessor models in Hamburg featured the well-known dumb-bell design. The new UNIVERSARIUM system, on the other hand, consists of the starball at the center and a group of eight individual projectors with mirror heads installed in front of it. The starball which is rotatable about three axes contains all projectors required for the night sky and projections associated with it such as constellations, scales and markings. The separate projectors reproduce the sun, moon, planets and other cosmic objects on the dome – in their astronomically correct orbits. The Hamburg projector contains slides with customized graphics for the planets. All planets of the solar system are portrayed, including those not visible to the naked eye: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Even small planets, artificial space probes or fictitious objects can be projected and moved in astronomical orbits. Solar and lunar eclipses, whether total, annular or partial, are displayed in their natural sequence. As an all-time first, an eclipse or the occultation of a star by the moon can be shown exactly for a specific location on the earth - Hamburg, for example. The digital control of the UNIVERSARIUM permits the positions of planets to be set in a matter of seconds. Leaps into the distant past or future are no problem, observations are no longer linked with our home planet Earth as the sole observing location. Flights through the solar system, the view of the sky from a neighboring planet, following a comet on its trajectory – all this can be demonstrated by the UNIVERSARIUM. With the design of the control system, Carl Zeiss leads the field. Simple commands are all that is needed to operate the planetarium both manually and interactively without restriction, and to run planetarium shows fully automatically. Live recordings, the combination of automatic sequences and manual presentations, the synchronization with audio systems and other computer systems are standard features of the UNIVERSARIUM. Careful thought has also been given to efficient servicing. If need be, Carl Zeiss can log into the UNIVERSARIUM's control system from Jena to perform remote diagnosis or software updates. Hamburg's claim to offer its planetarium audience totally new experiences through the use of leading-edge technology is also underlined by the installation of the first ZULIP laser image projector in Germany. The instrument developed by Carl Zeiss Jena and Jenoptik AG, Jena, uses laser light for image projection. A computer controls the movement of the image across the dome, permitting the simulation e.g. of a space probe approaching a planet or the trajectory of a comet under the stars. In addition, the image can be magnified and demagnified, and the optical zoom extends up to an image diagonal of 90 degrees, covering a quarter of the entire dome. Thanks to the ZULIP projector, the Hamburger planetarium is able to show images of the sky in a quality unparalleled by any other projection technology. The rich colors and the extremely wide contrast range are hallmarks of the laser projector. ZULIP can be loaded with any type of image data: still images (slides), downloads from the internet, videos, computer animations, live camera data. The projector offers ample leeway for creativity in program creation, presentation and special events. The planetarium technology from Carl Zeiss is supplemented by a digital projection system from the USA which depicts the cosmos as soon as the observer leaves our solar system. All projection systems ideally complement each other. The optical projector simulates nature in a way that directly appeals to the senses and with a realism unrivaled by any other system, while the digital projectors show computer-generated images which enhance our understanding of phenomena in the very depths of the universe. Gudrun Vogel Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH Press Officer Microscopes and Systems, Optical Systems and Components Phone: +49 3641 64-2770 Fax: +49 3641 64-2941 E-Mail: g.vogel@zeiss.de Carl Zeiss Planetarien D-07740 Jena Volkmar Schorcht Phone: +49(0)3641 64 2283 Fax: +49(0)3641 64 3023 E-Mail: planetarium@zeiss.de Number: J41/03 PL Number of Words: 968 Number of Characters: 6107

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