The big picture

Now that we have averted the threat of Sarah Palin getting within blow-torching distance of the U.S. Constitution, I can now go back to lighter-hearted pursuits. Although I’m still trying to keep my eyes on the big picture.

I recently saw a demo of a personal planetarium. It was a kind of dome turned on its side (you look forward instead of up), 12 feet across from left to right, and it cost about $40,000. For that you get an inflatable dome, projector with special wide-angle lens, and a personal computer complete with Universe-hopping graphics software.

Not having $40,000 to spend, and not really sure where exactly I would put the dome if I did, I’ve been opting for an alternate one-person solution that comes in at considerably lower cost – Ken’s handy dandy homegrown personal planetarium.

First you find the biggest LCD computer monitor you can get your hands on. Fortunately we have one of those cool Dell monitors in our lab, the 30″ diagonal ones with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels. It costs about $1300 these days, and it’s essentially the same as the largest Apple monitor. I suspect they’re actually made by the same people, only on one the casing is black so you’ll know you’re in league with the Evil Empire, and the other it’s white, like an iPhone on steroids.

In either case, the other component of the planetarium is something you can get for about $15 at your nearest drug store. Go to the section where they sell the reading classes. Usually there’s a giant rack of them, with all different perscriptions. Find the strongest one – I found one with a prescription of 3.25 diopters. Try to get glasses with the largest lenses you can find.

If you put one of those suckers on, you can focus perfectly at a distance of about five inches. Anything further away looks freakishly blurry, but something five inches away is crystal clear and gloriously magnified.

Now all you’ve got to do is look at your super-big monitor with your super-strong reading glasses, from about five inches away. Voila – your very own planetarium. The image on the screen fills your entire field of vision. It’s quite amazing.

Of course you need to either write or find some sort of appropriate software to undo the perspective distortion of the parts of the screen that are off to the sides. But that’s just software – these days you can probably get a high school student to write that for you.

Every once in a while it’s nice to be able to see the big picture.

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