Armand Spitz

As a side effort he made a 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m) papier-mache model of the Moon, which is on display to this day at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Following a demonstration at an astronomical conference at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Spitz received considerable publicity, and began marketing his Model A planetarium for $500.

Within a few years, Spitz introduced the model A-1, which incorporated the Sun, Moon, and five naked eye planets, still using the dodecahedron shape for the star projector.

Just at the time that Sputnik caused the United States government to provide considerably enhanced funding for science education, Spitz produced his model A3P.

[3] His company was developing the Space Transit Planetarium, a model with additional motion capabilities and more stars, when he suffered the first of a series of strokes in 1967.

These models originally used an incandescent bulb for starlight source, which produced fuzzy images resembling the glowing filament.

Due to the 180° limitation, the power-supply/lamp/lens assembly was mounted on leveling gimbals and incorporated a horizon cutoff mask to avoid projecting below-horizon stars.

Only 3 were installed, hanging from cables rather than on a large mount (U.S. Air Force Academy, Flint, MI, and Montevideo, Uruguay).

The STP Models The Space Transit Planetarium (variants in Miami, FL, Kansas City, and East Lansing, MI) used digital computers to move planets to different positions.