Nestled into the hills of a 3650-acre park filled with scenic views, wildlife, and a picturesque 100-year-old 44-acre reservoir lake, The Bays Mountain Park & Planetarium in Kingsport, TN features a world-class, state-of-the-art ZEISS hybrid planetarium system comprised of two main systems…their existing SKYMASTER ZKP-4 which was upgraded with LED illumination, providing a crisp night sky on the park’s 40ft dome, and a 6-channel ZEISS VELVET LED projection system provides a shadowless projection onto the dome using the most advanced projection technology available from ZEISS.
Both systems can be controlled together in a hybrid configuration to make best use of the technology for a particular task, such as leaving the stars to be created by the ZKP-4 while exploring an Earth-based view of the night sky, automatically transitioning to a digital representation of the stars when leaving earth’s atmosphere and travelling around the solar system and beyond. The VELVET LED projection features brilliant colors and a 2,500,000:1 native contrast ratio to maintain the depth of black one comes to expect away from the light pollution of a bustling city when looking at the night sky outside, or inside with a ZEISS star projector…both of which the staff have become quite accustomed to enjoying.
CHALLENGES OVERCOME: For this project, our team was faced with the challenge of thin walls and no interstitial space for mounting the projectors. With our theater scanning and proper planning, we were able to find optimal placement of the projectors within the theater and requiring removal of the fewest seats possible. Seiler provided the rigid projector mounts anchored to the floor, while the facility provided the decorative covers. The unique qualities of the ZEISS lensing allow the projectors to be aimed off-axis to the opposite side of the dome illuminating around the center-mounted star projector without casting distracting shadows in the image projection.
