Toysmith Nightscapes

A few years ago, Charlene gave me a "Glow in the dark ceiling Nightscapes™" kit from Toysmith Group2

The box contains an instruction manual, 4 different sizes of 6" or so long acrylic rods and one wire one, for different magnitude stars, a small specimen cup, a bottle of glow in the dark paint, and the projector assembly (which is part of the box). This is a little "grain of wheat" bulb inside a plastic dome, a battery holder, and a layer of box that has a positive template of the northern summer night sky. Turn on the bulb, set the template section slightly askew on the bottom, it projects a very dim display on to the ceiling.

On January 3, 2014, we finally got around to painting the ceiling.

If we were to do it again (and we may do another room):

•   cell phone camera isn't good for the dim stuff, so just a small region of the brighter starsSet up a way to switch the light external to the box. You may want to turn on and off the light (especially to try to see what you've already painted), and you can't do so without opening the box, which moves the projection and it's very difficult to re-align it. This will also let you change batteries. Luckily, our first set of batteries went dead during the planning and strategizing phase, but it's nice to have one less thing to worry about.

You may want a little more room between the bulb and the template to make the image on the ceiling smaller. Use something hard for this.

• Many online reviews mention that the bulb is fragile. Our original bulb glowed briefly and then burned out, we tried various LED options ('cause we had them lying around), they all projected little pictures of the LED shape on the ceiling. You really need a point light sources, we ended up replacing that bulb with a "grain of wheat lamp" bulb, either from Fundemonium (our local hobby store) or Radio Shack, I forget which.

The glow in the dark paint got cannibalized for something, so we ordered another replacement bottle from Amazon. Put the paint out in the sun so it's good and charged when you're actually painting.

• We clipped the rods in half so each of us would have a full set. This was plenty long, and stayed upright in the specimen cups well. A bit of tape on the clipped end gave us an in-the-dark cue of which end to use.

Cover everything. Really. Just takes one drip.

• The flattened box top makes a good shadow so you can see what you have and haven't painted.

Make a mask before-hand for the Milky Way. We did it with torn paper, but the template stars are way over-sized and it's super tough to figure out where the constellations are from it. If you're doing this at your own leisure when the paint isn't drying in the cups, you will be much happier.

Tonight we see how it actually looks.