Finally, it is installed. Daytime Now, the real reason it took so long. Night time. The reflection below the stars is the roof of my Camaro. This is the best pic I could get with my camera. Daytime with stars turned on This was a horribly tedious and boring project. There's an estmaited six miles, yes six miles, of fiber optic cable, strung basically three to four feet at a time. There are 32 LED's that power the stars. It's got its own power source. The backdrop itself is .080 styrene. The backdrop is 14' 3" long, and all of it has stars in it. I started this project right after Christmas. The painting took me about two weeks. I ordered my first order of cable, which was around $200. I literally got three and a half feet done, and it took two hours to do six inches of backdrop. I had to wait for a while until I started making decent money again(my job is kind of seasonal), and ordered another $700 worth of cable, but I have a little less than half of that left. My second order was almost nine miles of cable. This was the only project, other than weathering cars and putting together two buildings, I have done since Christmas. All told, this project was around $100 a foot, which is why it has to be the World's Most Expensive Backdrop Since I now have this done, I can now start doing other things, like making a city. This is the first layout I've had that has had backdrops, and it was installed long after everything else you see in the foreground. When I started this project, I knew that everything else was going to have to be put off, since I had to be up on the table to put the backdrop up. Thanks to Carl Sowell. He did this first, and I took his idea and sort of modified it and expanded it. Without his info, I wouldn't have even known where to start. There are a few more pics in my Railimages account, including a pic of what the back of it looks like before install.
That is a really cool idea. I think it would look much more natural though, if you were able to vary the brightness of random stars though. In the night sky, there are random stars that are that bright in the sky. If there is a way to do that, it would make them seem spead out more, and varying distances from earth. Really cool work though..
I think its cool, I don't think the stars translate very well to photograph though. Fact is.. there are billions of stars.. and if its a rural setting, they would look like that... but with just black and stars in a photo it doesn't look right, but I bet it looks great in person
Actually, the apparent density of the starry background of the real sky would be much less, with the majority of stars being quite faint. There are only several dozen stars in the sky that are really quite bright, a few hundred (over the entire sky) moderately so, with the majority - even in a dark rural sky - really quite faint. Likewise, the stars are not distributed in any sort of even density. NYW&B
that's pretty cool.. I can't see the Big Dipper though? Can I ask why the fiber optics though? Would it have been much simpler to just drill all those holes and then have a light source behind the board? Just a thought for next time
Personaly, I like his idea of the fiber optics better than a simple backlit board with holes. I think with the fiber, it might be easier to control the density of individual stars. I think it is really cool, and with some tweeking could be really awesome looking. I wonder if you could use a filter of sorts to give each star it's own charictor? Maybe even pink or blue filters to simulate one for mars, or other planets. Not all stars are the same color, and very in density and color. Just some ideas.. Its easy to come with ideas when it's not me doing the work, hahhah..
Ok, here's some of what I learned. Almost all of the LEDs that are used in this are of different brightnesses, and many have different resistors on them, so they should all come out at different brightnesses. Unfortunately, when you put them in the light tube, even different brightness LEDs come out almost all at the same brightness. It is possible to light certain stars very bright, and others not so bright. The pic doesn't show it well, but there are three different sizes of fiber optic cable. Many of the stars are much brighter than others because a .010 cable won't take as much light as the .030 cable. Individual stars is a possibility, and can even be done at this stage of the game. The fiber optic cable bundles just sit in the light tube, they're not glued there. So it would be easy to take out individual stars, although nearly impossible to find a specific star, and route this star to its own individual tube, and color it to any color you'd want to. Someday, I may actually try and do this, but for now, I've had enough of this project. It is also possible to unhook as many stars as I want to, and I've actually had the thought that I've got too many also. I've noticed that most of the guys making this comment are from Middle America. I'm from Illinois and now live in Washington, and can tell you with first hand knowledge, even as someone who doesn't pay attention to stars at all, that the number of stars you see in the sky in Washington and Montana are far more than what I see in Illinois. It is much better to design this with too many stars as too few, as I can now just take individual strands out of the tubes to cut down on the number of them. At four feet away, you can NOT see the strands that aren't lit up, and if you didn't know they were there, you wouldn't see them at a foot away. Fiber optic cable is cool stuff. I've got many other ideas in mind for it, and if you guys are thinking about working with it and haven't done it, try it. It's easy, and the rewards are well worth the effort.
Fan freekin tastic!! Can you see trains moving with just the star-light? Suggestion for diming... spray a coat of matt clear on the light source end of the F.O.? (I'd unhook and do like 20/30 at a time to save the time vs. one at a time)
How about something to vary the intensity a little while things are running. Would sort of replicate the twinkling of the stars. Even a color wheels of sorts with a few different color filters between the light source and the optics to accomplish the same. Looks really good though. I fully agree that it looks like a lot of stars. Setting out on the deck at my fathers farm in Nacy, KY (the middle of nowhere KY near Lake cumberland), there are that many stars visible, not not all as bright as the others but they are there.
For everyone who is so sure there are too many stars- the "yale book of bright stars" lists the number of stars visible to the naked eye as 9110. (in an area with no light pollution) Few people nowadays have ever been to a part of the country / world where there is no light from any nearby city "washing out" some of the stars. If you live in the US, take a look at this map showing light pollution http://www.lightpollution.it/worldatlas/pages/fig2.htm Most people have never seen the Milky Way with the naked eye- it's an awesome sight. But there are few places left to see it from. And by the way Ryan, I grew up in Montana, so I know what you mean. As a kid, the stars you could see in the mountains would blow your socks off. Kudo's to you Ryan, that was one heck of a lot of work. Once you get a city in place see if you can talk a friend with a high end digital camera into taking pictures. I'd love to see those.
While 9110 may be what the BSC claims, fully 50%-60% of those would be at or near the very limit of visual detection under even the best of skies. The generally accepted figure is more like 3,000-4,000 , with less than half of those visible over the entire sky at any given time. Likewise, since the majority of brighter stars tend toward areas of the milky way, the density of stars of even a modest brightness will vary widely over the sky, typically being impressive only in certain, limited, areas. Outside of these, the sky is not seen as truly peppered with stars. NYW&B
