P3D Cascade Stereoscopic Club meeting report (and anti-newton glass)

[michaelk@xxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Kersenbrock)]

Greetings,

	Yesterday morning was the January meeting of the Cascade 
Stereoscopic Club.  It met at the Oregon Museum of Science and 
Industry (OMSI) in Portland, Oregon with about 30 people attending,
including one new member.  Seeing as how other clubs
have been giving mini-reports, thought I'd do likewise.

	First of all, I took a few pictures using my
low-resolution digital camera, including some cha-cha stereo
pictures.  This to give some sense of reality to the report. There
are nine images, three of which are stereo non-crossed pairs.  I
did only a quick and ugly "mounting", and they were cha-cha's 
by room-light so let me apologize in advance for the so-so quality.
	
	Pictures are on a "secret" page (about 180K):

http://www.photo-3d.com/cscjan99.html    <<<<==================

The exciting thing about this meeting (to me) was the arrival of the
club's new Brackett  Engineering Stereo Fader Projector. One of the 
members also brought his in (I think more than one member bought
one in addition to the club's!) so we had a dissolve-pair.  It worked
great!!!!!  VERY nice projectors.  What's even kewl'er is that the
club's new projector is donated along with additional funds for a
larger screen!

The club's main event this meeting was the showing of quite a few
slides brought in by members for front-end triage selection (by the
entire attending membership) for a show that will be shown
by the club to the public in April.  A good many slides were selected
including one of mine.  Most of mine lost their impact when projected
(as did a lot of others shown) compared to halogen-viewer viewing.  I was
hoping that the Brackett projector would be noticeably brighter than
my Triad at home (where they were a bit dark as well), but this didn't
seem to be the case.  There were a lot of good ones selected, and our
show in April should be successful.

Shab Levy demonstrated *THE* way to tell which side of anti-newton
glass is anti-newton'd.  We turned down the lights, and Shab shined 
one of those pencil-sized pointer-lasers onto the glass 
laid  flat horizontally.  Angle of the light was about 45 degrees and the 
light reflected onto a vertical surface a couple feet on the other side.  On
the anti-newton'ed side the reflected pattern was a somewhat evenly diffussed
fuzzball while on the other side, the pattern had a sharp center dot.  Seems
like a great method if one happens to already have one of those laser pointers!
I'm not sure I'd buy one to check one piece of glass (rather than to just
use it and look for newton rings instead), but seems like a fun toy to have.  :-)

Experimental  color prints (on a color laser printer) of stereo images 
for our newsletter were shown.  Looks very promising if costs prove 
to be reasonable.  I know printing those with my ALPS printer (in
dye-sub mode) would not be reasonably priced as well as taking forever 
to print enough for an entire newsletter run.  :-)

Demo'd were some very nice holographs including one of a flower (orchid?)
and one of a microscope (which one can put one's eye downto and look at
the thing being magnified by it!).  Microscope looks like it rises 
vertically off the table about 5 or 6 inches (with the hologram laying
flat on the table).

Some tiny CRT based TV's were being used in pairs to show electronic stereo
images.  The cute little things have a teeny-tiny monochrome CRT (shown
on the table next to the monitors in one of the photographs mentioned
above).  In front of the CRTs are LCD controlled color filters such that 
the "white" Crt produces each color's image sequentially.

There undoubtedly were many other things "reportable", but I didn't
take notes, and my memory has run dry.  It's been more than 24 hours
since it ended, so I'm past one or two memory half-lives.  Anybody 
else at the meeting recall anything else?

Your faithful reporter,

Mike K.

P.S. - I also bought four boxes of 5P RBT mounts at the meeting to help me
       attack my still large pile of un-cut and un-mounted film. :-)


------------------------------