I don’t know if Mike Feinberg will even see this, but I actually have an answer to the star projector question he crowdsourced (I’m rarely able to join live because I am on the West Coast and am not an early morning person. If any Greek Chorus regulars see this, could you please tell Mike that I responded to his question here?). The short answer is that your best bet is to get a good projector and then run Stellarium, which is open source planetarium software.
If you don’t want to go that route, the best realistic compact star projector is the Dark Skys DS-1 Chrome Planetarium (~$600).
In the price tier below that, the best realistic option is the Sega Toys Homestar Flux Home Planetarium (~$230), but it’s quite a step down in terms of quality and clarity of the images.
ETA: my profile image does NOT feature one of the fancy home planetarium projectors that I recommended. That photo is just with a cheaper nebula projector that my cats love. In case you were wondering…
ETA2: for any people who are fans of both astronomy and jigsaw puzzles, I recently did the Ravensburger 1500 piece “Map of the Universe,” and it was seriously cool. Highly recommend.
I don’t know if Mike Feinberg will even see this, but I actually have an answer to the star projector question he crowdsourced (I’m rarely able to join live because I am on the West Coast and am not an early morning person. If any Greek Chorus regulars see this, could you please tell Mike that I responded to his question here?). The short answer is that your best bet is to get a good projector and then run Stellarium, which is open source planetarium software.
If you don’t want to go that route, the best realistic compact star projector is the Dark Skys DS-1 Chrome Planetarium (~$600).
https://dark-skys.com/products/ds-1-chrome-home-planetarium
In the price tier below that, the best realistic option is the Sega Toys Homestar Flux Home Planetarium (~$230), but it’s quite a step down in terms of quality and clarity of the images.
https://www.segatoys.space/en/public/flux.html
ETA: my profile image does NOT feature one of the fancy home planetarium projectors that I recommended. That photo is just with a cheaper nebula projector that my cats love. In case you were wondering…
ETA2: for any people who are fans of both astronomy and jigsaw puzzles, I recently did the Ravensburger 1500 piece “Map of the Universe,” and it was seriously cool. Highly recommend.
https://www.ravensburger.us/en-US/products/jigsaw-puzzles/puzzles-for-adults/map-of-the-universe-12000703