About The Slides We Make For Show Packages

When you order show package slides from us, what we ship is ready to drop in the tray. And being "right from the source" quality, our slides will look their finest on the dome!

Our slides are meticulously prepared and assembled by hand in Wess glass slide mounts. Most contain two chips of film -- one or two Ektachrome color images and/or a Kodalith mask sandwiched in, to opaque the background where appropriate -- no "floating GRIS" (Gray Rectangles In Space)!

We project each one for quality assurance, painstakingly removing any dirt specks or dust and rechecking them again. Next we label each slide with its number, show name, and description; and finally collate and box them. It's an extremely labor-intensive production process!

Slides of single panel, full-frame images are relatively simple. However, a show's multi-panel images -- the horizon panoramas and all-skies -- become problematic as slides. Without any theater standardization -- number of projectors, amount of overlap and edge-blending, level dome or tilted, angle of offset, to name a few concerns -- we simply can't provide panorama slides that will work perfectly with any given dome.

So what we do is crude but simple: we provide panorama slides in abutting-edge form. Our long art panels are divided into 3:2 ratio frames and shot flat at 100%, without overlap. The rationale is this: it takes little technical skill to simply abut projected slide frames along the bottom of the dome. This brute-force method doesn't correct for the curvature of the dome, unfortunately, so the adjoining edges slop over toward the tops.

We expect the professional planetarian will rework the multi-panel slides, and be familiar with methods for stitching together images to rephotograph them for a particular horizon projector system. Of course, the modern planetarium professional will likely use dome image processing software such as DigiDome^® for the purpose! That's why we have it in our catalog, and offer it at a special discount when you license a show! If you've been thinking about "going digital", here's the incentive! You'll already have the show's images in digital form, they're already stitched together (actually they were never "split apart", that's their original form). The quality is as good as we can provide you, much better than you would get from scanning film slides or rephotographing projections, and we've already done all the Photoshop work, including making the masks. And DigiDome automatically makes custom soft-edge masks for your images, too!

For all-sky slides, we use DigiDome ourselves to split our dome master circles into the familiar six "pie-wedge" frames, using settings for a generic 36mm focal length lens and a 10m radius dome on our virtual projectors. The single chips of film have soft-edge blends to black built in. Our generic slides might work in your all-sky projectors, though the overlapping of the edges may be troublesome. Another good reason to get DigiDome, so you can make your own slides, custom-fit to your facility's needs!

We know some digitally-enabled planetarians will prefer to make their own multi-panel images to custom-fit their panoramas and all-skies, and have us provide the rest of the single-frame images. That's why we separate the singles and "multis" in our pricing structure.

But what does all this cost?

The answer is, "we're competitive with other sources, but if you want to conserve every last nickel, you might be able to find lower prices, or do it yourself."

When we get an order for a show with slides, we seldom "one-off" the images, but instead make up a batch of several complete slide sets. Usually we have at least one on the shelf available for shipment, though it's "luck of the draw" when your order comes in. We price our slide sets at a flat rate, though it works out to around $3 per slide.

You may decide you can do the slide mounting work for less, which is fine with us too. See this page for more info about alternatives.