So in my last post, which now feels like ages ago, I mentioned that I was going to be creating a gigantic projection design for Holst’s suite The Planets, to be performed with The Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra.

It had been my intention to blog about the creative process as I was creating the piece. As you may have determined by now, that didn’t happen. Instead, I ended up putting virtually every free moment I had into creating the projections. It was worth it.

The performance was really extraordinary, and received an extended standing ovation with the conductor being called back for additional bows three times.

More importantly, the audience was truly engaged by the combination of music and imagery. I was able to talk to a number of members of the audience after the show, and was really blown away by the response.

At some point, I will have some extended excerpts from the piece to share with you, I am dealing with some technical issues about how to convert them into a format that I can upload.

What I do have, that I can share with you now, is the trailer that I created as a preview for the orchestra’s website.

I’d also like to share with you my program notes, which I think will give you some idea of my thought process and creative process.

Creating imagery for “The Planets” is a daunting task for a projection designer. Holst’s amazing music was written about the astrological planets, that is to say, the significance that the planets have in classical astrology. In Holst’s time, the beauty of the astronomical planets
(the actual objects in space) was just beginning to be discovered through powerful telescopes, and was not widely known.

Today, we are fortunate to have an amazing and almost endless catalogue of images of the universe. Images, from ground-based telescopes  and spacecraft such as Hubble and the Mars Rovers provide an incredible wealth of scientific knowledge and also of visual texture and beauty. It is in this second capacity, as artistic images, that I draw on them for this piece. I also draw heavily on the 3-D space visualizations which it is possible to create using modern computers and the amazing DigitalSky 2 software. This software was created here in New Hampshire by Sky-Skan, and is used in
planetariums all over the world.

Each movement begins with imagery of the planet that it is named for, from there we go wherever the music and the visual rhythm of the
imagery lead. In some movements we explore the planet and its moons, in others we fly to the very edge of the visible universe. I’ve made a choice not to be bound by the science of what these objects are, but simply to allow the music to lead my eye wherever in the universe it is drawn. So I invite you to approach experiencing this
piece as I do, as a feast for the ears and the eyes, and let your heart take flight.

I’ll have another post going up on Thursday where I’ll talk about some of the technology behind the show.

And by the way,  I’d love to bring The Planets to a performance hall near you!  If you know of a local performance of The Planets that might be interested in projections, please let me know!

A couple of weeks ago I spend 4 days in a local elementary school with an inflatable planetarium.  I did shows during the day for all of the classes in the school (20 shows in all) and then did brief, 12 minute public shows in the evenings(18 of those).  In all, 600+ people saw a show in the dome.

After a couple of the public shows, I gave the audiences a peek behind the scenes. Here's my Mac desktop on the dome, warped by the mirror.

I have to say, I had an amazingly good time – the teachers and students were wonderful – and the kids had amazing questions.  But I’ll talk about that another time…  What I want to talk about today is the geeky end of the whole thing – and how it’s possible to set up a portable, inflatable digital planetarium.

The Dome

The dome, made by Go-Dome, is inflated much like a bounce house at a fair, except that it has no floor – it just sits on the floor of the room it is set up in.  You roll it out on the floor and it inflates in a couple of minutes.  The kids (and adults) really enjoy squeezing through the airlock to get inside.

The dome set up and ready for an audience.

The Projection and the Mirror

The projection technology I used is very cool.  It was originally developed by Paul Bourke, an Australian academic who works on 3d, dome projection and related ideas. The problem with digital projection in domes traditionally is that it either requires many projectors, blended together, or a very very expensive custom fisheye lens.  Paul realized that a single projector aimed at a 1/2 hemisphere mirror would cover almost the entire dome.  He then figured out the warping process that’s necessary to pre-distort the images to be projected, so when the are distorted by the curvature of the mirror, they come out right on the dome.   If you’d like to know more about this process in detail, check out Paul’s pages on spherical mirror dome projection.

I used a commercial implementation of Paul’s technology from Discovery Dome.  It encloses the  (fragile) mirror in a case which opens up.  The projector goes under the mirror facing forward, the light bounces off a flat mirror, and then off the spherical mirror on to the dome.  This keeps the projector out of the way….

Here's a look at the back of the dome - the funny looking thing towards the upper right is the spherical mirror setup. I'm to the right behind the computers.

The Computers

All of the images were generated from my MacbookPro, and I used a Macbook for control of certain things on the projection computer – more on that later.

The software I ran is an open source project called Nightshade, which is a fork of Stellarium specifically for use in domes.  By using a combination of live keyboard commands in Nightshade and running scripts written in Nightshades scripting language that I wrote, I had a very powerful and flexible planetarium that I could use interactively to take the shows where ever the kids questions lead.

That interactivity is where the 2nd computer came in – running scripts in Nightshade requires going several levels deep in a menu and taking more time the I wanted.  That is for all the scripts except the demo which runs from a keyboard shortcut.  So I wrote a shell script to give me a menu of my scripts and rename whichever one I wanted to run “demo.sts.” so I could run it with the hotkey.

The only problem is that when Nighshade is running, it takes over the displays completely – no way to have a terminal open to run my script in.  So I brought the Macbook – I used it to SSH into the Nightshade computer and run my shell script.  So I used the Macbook to select scripts, and the MacbookPro right in Nightshade to do everything else.

It’s kind of a hack, but it worked great.

Try it yourself

By the way – If I’ve gotten you interested in trying to do something like this on your own, you can home build your own planetarium.  I particularly like the instructions on the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope site. You can use this with Nightshade, or with the MS WorldWide Telescope – which I highly recommend.  In fact I would have used it in my shows if I had known about it at the time – it’s not a replacement for Nightshade (in my view) but a great compliment to it, and an amazing piece of work.  Lots of fun on your desktop to – you don’t need to run it in a planetarium.

Here I am in front of the dome at the end of a long day of shows.

On to the Planets

Now I’m moving on to another astronomically related projection project – I’m creating giant projections that will accompany the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Holst’s suite The Planets.  The Performance will be on June 6th at The Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH.  I’m going to be blogging about my design process along the way, so keep an eye out for that, coming up soon.

Planetariums are magical places for many of us – I’d love to hear stories about your first or most memorable planetarium visit in the comments!