Hi all. I've been a big fan and supporter of Cartes du Ciel before most even knew about it (I even compiled the very first Tycho catalogs for it! :) (now obsolete :( )
But I have a fun project I'm trying to do. I recently bought a fun toy called an "Astrostar" planetarium projector from ebay. Sold by a lot of folks in China. A little searching on ebay by that name and you can get one with delivery for under US$10. They're really nice for that price. And if you substitute a little MagLight halogen bulb for them (those teeny-tiny grain-of-wheat lamps), you can get really nice pin-points of stars projected all over your room. BUT ... there's a problem with these Astrostar toys. I found that the panels to create the dodecahedron star-projection slides do NOT represent the true sky. They are just thousands of random dots. Some of the sellers show true constellations on the photos' walls in their ads, but when I wrote to them asking about it they all confirmed that they just project random dots. I couldn't find any sellers that sold ones with true night-sky patterns. So I thought ... Cartes du Ciel to the rescue! I could print up new panels on transparency material using the highest resolution of my photo-quality printer. Then assemble a new projection dome from those. So ... is there any easy way to divvy-up the sky into the required panels? The south face of the dodecahedron is taken up by the base of the simple "projector", so only 11 of the 12 dodecahedron panels are needed. I found too that if I zoom out far enough for one side of a dodecahedron that many areas of the sky don't get filled in with stars from the Tycho 2 catalog. A display limit I think (computer RAM related?) The empty areas get filled in again when I zoom in. It would be great if there were some simple script of something where it would take a star display up to magnitude of 9 or so and spit it out into the required pentagon shapes for printing. I could then even include subtle colored lines for the constellations and all too. This little and inexpensive "Astrostar" toy would be really nice with the true sky projected with the accuracy, lines, colors, and shadings of Cartes du Ciel's display. Can anyone help? Think too of all those kids that might have bought these star-projector toys. If they knew of a program that could create the true sky for them, improving it, even printing labels on objects, it would get Cartes du Ciel into a lot of new hands and minds and get them learning! Maybe in the future there could be a menu option in Cartes du Ciel for printing things like this, and a simpler cylinder for an equatorial projection, or planispheres too.
