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The new Star Projector will be arriving in late Fall 2006 and once again it will be the first Minolta star projector of its kind in the United States. Of course that means the old one has to go. Space and budgetary constraints have kept us from keeping the MS-15 here in the newly renovated planetarium. However, someone close to the De Anza Planetarium family will be looking after this venerable old machine and he will be searching for a local facility to display the projector. |
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| To move the Planetarium Projector out of the building, we had to separate it from all the electrical wiring that was snaked to it over 35 years ago with many more wires laid over, under, around and through them during the intervening years. Before the era of micro-circuitry, everything was hard-wired together. This meant lots of bundles of big, high current carrying wires. Although the wiring was neatly done and all the terminal blocks had been well labeled, there was no remaining documentation for what the labels and numbers signified: It’s just a bunch of spaghetti! Many valuable relays, transformers, switches, potentiometers and the panels were salvaged for possible future use. |
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This week we had to prepare the Minolta MS-15 Star Projector to be shipped off to its new home. Minolta Corporation gifted the MS-15 star projector to De Anza College in 1970. This MS-15 star projector was the first of its type to be housed in a United States Planetarium. It is a crazy, fascinating looking machine. Planetarium goers were often as interested in the MS-15 as much as the stars it projected onto the planetarium dome. The last few weeks have been extremely hectic as we packed up the equipment from the planetarium theater and prepped the MS-15 for storage. Deciding what to pack and what to get rid of has been a challenge. |