The event at Barnes & Noble today went very well.  It was not a huge crowd, but just about everyone that came by was very interested in either the Viking Mars Mission or astronomy.  I had some long conversations with people of all ages and, hopefully, encouraged some young people to consider studying astronomy.  It doesn’t get much better than that!

The large backlit print on the left side of my table is an experiment I’ve been working on to offer a “premium” backlit print category.  The primary enhancement is greatly increased contrast ratio.  Theoretically, it is more than 500,000:1, but in reality it is limited by light reflections.  To counter that, this sample uses special glass with an anti-reflective coating.  Despite the high cost of this glass, it didn’t completely solve the problem because the surface of the film is itself very shiny!  I have some other options to test, but this is at least an improvement over regular glass.  The brightness of the light source is also increased (about double that of my standard backlit print), so the image has both darker blacks and brighter highlights.

The other enhancement, of course, is the solid wood frame.  After putting it together I think that the width of the border (including both the wood frame and the black mat) is too much for this size of image, but that is easy to fix.  This one is a commercially made frame, but I’m hoping to be able to offer very high quality, hand-crafted, custom frames for larger backlit prints.