Some Cool Boston Museums Images

It has been here since 1970, though it itself replaced the museum’s original projector from ten years earlier.

Tomorrow, this projector gets decommissioned, dismantled, and shipped to another museum in Colorado.

I remember going to see presentations with it as a kid in the early 1980s, and maybe even earlier than that. (I also remember seeing laser shows to Pink Floyd albums as a teenager in the 1990s, but I’m not sure if the projector has anything to do with the laser shows.)

The new projector is going to be an egg-shaped Zeiss Starmaster, instead of the "barbell" shaped version that we had here.

It looks like it is going to have some impressive capabilities — digital projection via fiber optic links of color-accurate objects, yadda yadda yadda — but I’ll probably always miss this one, and will picture a giant dumbbell-shaped contraption in the middle of the room whenever I think of what a planetarium is "supposed" to look like.

So it goes.

Interesting detail, which completely doesn’t come across in my photos here: the projector is actually blue, similar to many of the ones on display at the Planetarium Museum web site.

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As for these photos:

We lucked out on making it in to a show on the last day. I’d read in December that the planetarium was to close for renovations, but I wasn’t sure when the last day would be, and I didn’t know that the projector was going away in the process. More to the point, by January I’d forgotten about the renovations to begin with.

We just happened to decide to go to the museum that day, and we just happened to decide to use the planetarium passes that we’d bought almost a year ago. We only found out once the show started that this was to be the last day the theatre would be open before closing for a year, and that the projector was getting shipped to another museum in Colorado. If the museum presenter said the name, I didn’t catch it.

If I’d realized 5 minutes earlier that this was it, I’d have set the camera to night photography mode & tried to get some pictures of the show. But it was on Automatic, and wouldn’t lock an exposure on the ceiling in the dark, and I didn’t want to be fumbling with the controls (and the bright LCD screen on the back) while the show was underway.

Oh well.

* * * * *

Seen on:

It has been here since 1970, though it itself replaced the museum’s original projector from ten years earlier.

Tomorrow, this projector gets decommissioned, dismantled, and shipped to another museum in Colorado.

I remember going to see presentations with it as a kid in the early 1980s, and maybe even earlier than that. (I also remember seeing laser shows to Pink Floyd albums as a teenager in the 1990s, but I’m not sure if the projector has anything to do with the laser shows.)

The new projector is going to be an egg-shaped Zeiss Starmaster, instead of the "barbell" shaped version that we had here.

It looks like it is going to have some impressive capabilities — digital projection via fiber optic links of color-accurate objects, yadda yadda yadda — but I’ll probably always miss this one, and will picture a giant dumbbell-shaped contraption in the middle of the room whenever I think of what a planetarium is "supposed" to look like.

So it goes.

Interesting detail, which completely doesn’t come across in my photos here: the projector is actually blue, similar to many of the ones on display at the Planetarium Museum web site.

* * * * *

As for these photos:

We lucked out on making it in to a show on the last day. I’d read in December that the planetarium was to close for renovations, but I wasn’t sure when the last day would be, and I didn’t know that the projector was going away in the process. More to the point, by January I’d forgotten about the renovations to begin with.

We just happened to decide to go to the museum that day, and we just happened to decide to use the planetarium passes that we’d bought almost a year ago. We only found out once the show started that this was to be the last day the theatre would be open before closing for a year, and that the projector was getting shipped to another museum in Colorado. If the museum presenter said the name, I didn’t catch it.

If I’d realized 5 minutes earlier that this was it, I’d have set the camera to night photography mode & tried to get some pictures of the show. But it was on Automatic, and wouldn’t lock an exposure on the ceiling in the dark, and I didn’t want to be fumbling with the controls (and the bright LCD screen on the back) while the show was underway.

Oh well.

* * * * *

Seen on:

This bottle was featured in Zippy the Pinhead‘s 27 Jan 2003 comic strip.

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