Caring for your Starscape Star Cloth

Fibre optic star cloths have several advantages over alternative forms which use pea lights or LEDs. You get the option of increasing the brightness (if necessary) by using a more powerful lightsource; you can have colour change effects via colour and twinkle wheels and there's only ever the one bulb to change. There's no electricity in the cloth itself, and this is a safety advantage.


Look after your star cloth and it should last years. The chief thing to take into consideration is that you need to avoid damaging the special coating on the fibres which gives them their property of "total internal reflectivity". If the coating is damaged light will leak out of the side of the fibre, with the result that less light is delivered to create the "star" in the face of the cloth.

Our cloths are lined to protect the fibres from being snagged or scratched, but you should also avoid stacking heavy objects on the folded cloth, or folding it too tightly. The fibres have to bend through 90 degrees as they pass through the cloth and this bending inevitably stresses the fibre. The more it's stressed, the more light will leak and the greater the chance is of the fibre snapping.

We use 1mm fibre as the best compromise between 0.75mm - likely to dim over time through wear and tear to the fibre - and 1.5 mm - bright but less flexible and more likely to snap.


So, handle your cloth with respect and you'll increase its service life. We've recently had a customer come back to us with a request that we fit a new fibre optic harness to his star cloth to bring it back to "as new" brightness, but since he has used the cloth in around 300 gigs over two years, he's very happy with the investment he made in his Starscape star cloth.

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