Big Sky(pans)

Frank Yazvac from Hope Church in Bettendorf, IA brings us these these awesome large skypan lights.

From Frank: We started with the idea of creating Skypans like in recent designs, but tried to make them as big as possible. We took 17 gal steel tubs and drilled holes for light sockets we’ve had for a few years along with holes for lighting clamps on the top side.

We also had the idea of wanting to do a star field, but did not want to just hang strands of lights. So we took 8 4×8 sheets of black Coroplast and took a day to drill random holes in them and pushed individual bulbs of Christmas light strands through them. We actually had a lot of fun creating constellations and some random fun pictures. We raised the starfield on a wooden 2×2 frame with a heavy rope and pulley and screwed the frame directly to the wall.

Then we hung the skypans on a 15 foot truss along with some smaller lights between them. The idea was to create distant stars, closer stars and then really close stars(the skypans).

We created 4 8×8 section of the star field so that we could control each of four squares with dimmers for some fun chases. The skypans also do a great job of backlighting for some drama. Overall, it was a lot of work but so much fun creating something that we hadn’t seen before. The whole design cost about $300. We already had light sockets along with bulbs and the smallest lights and trussing.