ZEISS will present new developments and products at several online events in 2021. The focus will be on the new ASTERION Starball for planetariums with small and medium dome sizes. ASTERION and ASTERION Premium have been developed to showcase the strengths of the optical-mechanical representation of the night sky. The projector is particularly small, energy-saving and at the same time produces a realistic, very bright and brilliant starry sky. ASTERION acts as the optical-mechanical component of a hybrid planetarium. For the coupling and display of the digital content, our UNIVIEW planetarium software has been further enhanced. All projections of a classical planetarium projector like great circles, coordinates and scales are integrated in UNIVIEW and can be shown synchronously with the optical starry sky. Of course, UNIVIEW also offers many other functions for earth-bound astronomy.

The most significant new development is UNIVIEW Open Dome. With this option, external computers such as workstations or laptops can be used to provide fulldome projections up to full 4k resolution and 60 frames per second in real time for dome projection. This makes it possible for the first time in the planetarium's history to use any content for the dome projection in the highest quality. A long-cherished wish comes true with the software extension that allows to integrate one or more planar videos from Uniview into the dome projection.

Let Sophia Dannberg demonstrate the new features and additions in UNIVIEW in the following videos.

The first Uniview Forum took place at ZEISS in Jena on 5 and 6 December 2019. ZEISS invited Uniview users to the first Uniview Forum in Jena. With the meeting ZEISS continues the tradition of the Uniview User Group meetings. ZEISS informed about the status of the Uniview software and the services provided regarding user content, data hosting and support.

Among the guests and lecturers were many "super users", who, especially by their own modules, greatly extend the possibilities of the software. ZEISS presented the new hybrid control of UNIVIEW with its opto-mechanical projectors. The transition between the optical and digital stars is not only very smooth, it also works with active diurnal and polar altitude motion. ZEISS confirmed to the user community that in future all content that has been and will be shared by users will also be freely available to all users. The participants of the Uniview Forum showed special interest in the presentation of specific applications by means of the software. Marc Subbarao, Director Space Visualization Laboratory, Adler Planetarium showed how Uniview effectively can be used to present the history and the methods of detecting extrasolar planets. Dan Tell, Planetarium Engineering Manager at the California Academy of Sciences introduced module developments. Other speakers included Ryan Wyatt, California Academy of Sciences and KaChun Yu of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The presentations were recorded and can be watched following the links below. Please request the password sending an email to plane tarium @zeiss .com. Press the Vimeo button and enter the password to access the videos.