"The finest display any lobby can have.  People just head for it, go to it. " Jim Vickery, former co-director, Johnson Planetarium, Lakewood, Colorado

Santa Barbara

Leicester

Smithsonian

Colorado

Oakland

New Jersey

NASA-Ames

Toronto

The Santa Barbara Museum is rapidly developing a limited amount of room into a world class space exhibit hall.

Planetarium director Steve Schmidt had a limited amount of unused space behind the planetarium controls.  To squeeze the maximum display into that space we decided to truncate a spherical Stellarium map by shaving off a little from both the front and back of the map. The Stellarium was built as a free standing unit that could be slid into the space after a section of the wall was removed. 

The Stellarium is the newest one on display. It uses only 20 watts of power and is totally silent in operation.

Below: The Santa Barbara Stellarium is moved to the Astronomy Hall. Temporary casters were removed to slide the unit into place. The Stellarium was delivered as a finished unit and installed in a single morning. The museum will supply the final finished face to match the hall.

Right: The solid hardwood case. We use no particleboard. An extremely durable push button panel to illuminate internal star markers was requested. The panel face is cut from a single oak board with countersunk gray acrylic cover. The buttons were designed for use in video arcade machines.  The buttons glow softly below the name of each star identified.