Star_*Lines for DigitalSky
add-on package for Definiti^® Theater customers

Introduced in 1989, our Star_*Line series of constellation artwork images quickly became a classic planetarium favorite. We shipped thousands of gelled Kodalith slides hand-mounted in Wess glass mounts, and they adorned the heavens from carefully-aimed single-shot and carousel slide projectors from coves around the world. And they've transcended their planetarium origins; we've licensed their usage in all kinds of other applications — from hospital signage to personal tattoos!

As the medium of the planetarium has moved from analog film to digital projection, we've moved our Star_*Lines into the digital night sky too. If you're a user of Sky-Skan's DigitalSky (we are!), we've put together a great add-on package for you.

Images, we've got images...

Included are 206 individual artwork images. There are all 88 traditional constellations, along with Big Dipper and Little Dipper asterisms as well. We include both the shapely classic as well as the clothed "Family Values" versions of the human figures, so you can choose whichever ones you prefer (or your social mores dictate). And every Star_*Line has a separate "glowing" version, adding an ethereal aura to the heavenly panoply.

More than simple stick figures or line graphics, artist Tim W. Kuzniar's chiaroscuro-style overlays use the IAU boundaries as rough outlines for many of the shapes and poses of the figures. But their purpose is to just indicate the general area of the constellation with its classical namesake, rather than align with specific stars.

Buttons...

DigitalSky comes with its own set of buttons for constellations. We've created an additional set for our Star_*Lines, keeping Sky-Skan's familiar layout and pointing to their Stick figures and IAU outlines. Our set contains nine pages full of buttons — 825 button scripts in all!

Plug-In...

If you're used to using the DigitalSky Constellation Plug-In Controller, we've got you covered there, too. We provide our own Plug-In controller for our Star_*Lines. Simply install it, and you can click your way through its checkboxes to choose artwork, color, glows, labels, stick figures, and more.

Pricing/Licensing...

As we said, we introduced the Star_*Line series in 1989 — our initial foray into providing an Image Library for planetarium producers to use for their dome shows. Now, you could license individual Star_*Line images from our Image Library, on an ala carte basis. To use them in DigitalSky, you would have to run through a process of converting our distribution TIFs into the unique TGA format DigitalSky constellations use (only alpha channel and no RGB image). Then you would need to do all the work to write your own button scripts for scaling, rotating, positioning and coloring the images, of course. Finally, to license all 200+ Star_*Line images in our "Planetarium, general" usage category at $25 each, would cost more than $5000.

That's why we think our pricing for this add-on package is such a good value. Not only do you get the imagery, you get all the work we put in writing the buttons, and the Plug-In controller as well.

We expect the terms of the in-house usage license will meet the needs of the vast majority of DigitalSky users. Chances are good that just having our Star_*Lines appear on your dome will be all that's necessary for your purposes. Just as with the other images in our Image Library, we do offer an external usage license too, so you can use the Star_*Line imagery in other media you may produce and distribute outside of your theater.

The Star_*Lines for DigitalSky package is available for Internet delivery as a 50MB Zip file. Once unzipped, installation is simple; you just copy the folders and files to their appropriate destinations on your DigitalSky computers.