# Building a Moon Box



## firewater88 (May 15, 2013)

Been contemplating building a moon box to go along with our star drop. I did a search but didnt see any threads on them.
Was thinking of printing a moon image on clear acetate (which I already have) 42" wide and sandwich between two sheets of plexi. Placing the whole thing in a shallow round custom box. I found Elation LED tape light and a controller (with DMX). 
Has anyone done one of these? I have had one from a set rental company before as part of a show (they no longer have it), but I think it had incandescent lamps inside.
Would LED tape on the inside rim (aiming to the center) be enough light? Should I do RGB to do color mixing? maybe a blue moon or amber or..
Any thoughts before I dive into this project...

Thanks!


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## Van (May 15, 2013)

I did a similar moon box a couple of years ago and it worked pretty well. I found a really nice hi-rez pic of a full moon, printed in on the plotter on acetate and mounted it to a piece of plexi. I did, however build a pretty traditional box; about 3" deep and about 8" larger that the circle of plexi in Diameter. Painted the inside of the box white, for bounce, then used about 30 feet of rope light, attached to the inside wall of the box as a light source. The dimming curve on incandescent's allows for much more dramatic low light looks, imho. I guess you could run some RBG/white rope light in there if you wanted to really do some color mixing.


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## cdub260 (May 15, 2013)

I also built a similar moon box for the Pageant. High rez photo of the moon on a piece of plexi, cut in the shape of a disk. I made two rings with the same outer diameter made of 1/2 in. plywood, one an inch wide, the other 3/4 in. Then I glued and stapled the two rings together with the thicker ring as the front of the moon. This gave me a good nest in which to glue the moon image. If I remember correctly I used a product called Lexel to glue the moon to the rings. Then I cut out a smaller disk for the back side of the moon box and painted the inside of the disk white and the outside black. I then attached several dimmable Xenon Task Lights to the inside of the disk. I connected the back disk to the front ring using 1x2 pieces cut at an angle with the disk set back six inches from the front rings. I should have set it back eight inches as this would have resulted in a more even light spread. I lined the gap between the 1x2's with white lycra stolen from our costume department, then covered the outside of the moon box with duvetyne. A later modification was to cover the face of the moon with black scrim. If I need to access the inside of the moon box to change a lamp or other maintenance, I cut a slit in the side which I later seal with duvetyne tape.


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## firewater88 (May 21, 2013)

Thanks for the info guys...

Started putting it into CAD to get the sizes right. 1 question- how large was the overall size? did you go 4'? Also, am I reading it right that you had 8" difference in the image circle and the outer box circle? When I laid it out in CAD, with 2x2 runners to connect the front and back, I wound up with about 3" of space for the rope light to lay up against the runners to the edge of the image. Should I make the image size smaller to gain more even spread from the rope light?
Also, if I used spray adhesive to mount the acetate to the plexi, do you think the "frost" from the adhesive will hurt the overall look?

Thanks


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