Thanks
I had great support by a number of companies and individuals, to whom I owe a big thanks:
- Evans & Sutherland, USA kindly provided the Digistar3 SP2 software.
- SCISS AB of Sweden provided their UNIVIEW software.
- The Elumenati wrote the Omnimap geocorrection library that brought UNIVIEW onto my dome
- 3G Software & Measurement provided their JointMetrix3D software for photogrammetrical reconstruction. I called them on my cell phone from El Salvador, and six months later we met in Austria to discuss photogrammetry.
- ESRI has a program under which students can use ArcGis® 9 for free!
- The Salvadorian Geological Survey (SNET) provided invaluable support in the field as well as all my digital base maps.
- The Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) granted me a travelling stipend for my field work that apparently fed me well enough to think of dome construction.
- The calculation and manufacture of the support structure was an all family effort. My family saw they could not prevent me from dome construction, so they helped me in any incredible way, and when the structure was completed we felt like the engineers of the Eiffel Tower.
- Lars Wind gave me invaluable help figuring out the projection design. No words can describe it!
- The Mediendom of the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel provided INCREDIBLE logisitcal help setting up Digistar3 overnight.
- Practically all my friends and colleagues in Kiel had their hands on the dome during construction, and I could not work or live without them!
- My friends at the AMNH and the DMNS, Dr. Carter Emmart and Dr. Ka Chun Yu tirelessly answered my skype posts concerning data integration. I hope we continue this work soon!
- The team at the Technik und Logistikzentrum of IFM-GEOMAR always managed to squeeze some work for my crazy construction attempts into their busy work schedule and built two marvellous optical adaptors.
- Dr. Peter Linke listened to Armin and me for twenty minutes and decided to join our project by financing one of the two required video projectors. WOW!
- My two supervisors, Dr. Armin Freundt and Dr. Steffen Kutterolf had the guts to support this project which is by far bigger than a normal masters thesis is supposed to be. They let me have their cars and machine shops. They came in at weekends, lying under the dome and watching the canvas rise into shape. They thankfully suggested the weirdest parts of the project so I did not have to utter the same thoughts myself. They showed me some great steak restaurants in San Salvador. All along, they taught me volcanology, which is an incredible subject.