Proceedings of the Western Alliance Desert Skies Conference
October, 1999




Stars that Need Not
Shun The Light.

Thanks to Zeiss Fiber Optics.


The stars, those apparent lord of the night sky,
are terribly afraid of light. For millions of years,
since the first seeing creatures populated the
Earth, only the Sun was able to dim down its
distant brothers into nothingness. Today, this is
easily accomplished by street lamps, neon signs
and car headlights.

In the planetarium, things are hardly different.
For decades, stars used to be the protagonists
of the show, and not even the sun was allowed
to outshine them. Today, shows are dominated
by fireworks of slides, videos, panoramas and
all-sky projections: a profusion of light, which
leaves only the gleaming dots that symbolize the
boundlessness of the universe no chance
to assert themselves. Are planetarium stars
doomed to final extinction?

Thanks to Zeiss, they are not. Thanks to a
new fiber optic system that makes artificial
stars shine more brightly and brilliantly
than ever before. No doubt, slide, video,
and panorama projectors will hardly extinguish
them. An although they are much smaller in
size than their forerunners, they are seen as
mere points, twinkling as do the real stars. See
the world's newborn stars in the sky of a Zeiss
planetarium.



Seeing is Believing!
For further information contact Pearl Reilly:

1-800-726-8805

fax: 1-504-764-7665

email: Plreilly@aol.com
Planetarium Division

170 E. Kirkham Ave., St. Louis, MO 63119-1791