Photos from the 2006 Early Television Convention

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Steve McVoy

The other problem is the dispersion angle. The light source has to have a wide enough beam to illuminate all 45 lenses in the disk, which is located about 2 inches from the source. The distance from the outermost lens to the innermost one on the disk is about 1/2 inch, so you need about a 15 degree beam width. Without this requirement, a laser of some sort might work.

There must be some way to use a condensing lens arrangement to reduce the size of the spot from a high power LED, but I don't know enough about optics to do it. If anyone has any ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Without major modifications to all the optics including the lenses on the disc, I'd guess it can't be done - the system essentially projects the image of the crater as a spot on the screen, I believe, and has a fixed magnification, so increasing the size of the source necessarily increases the size of the spot.