Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Feb 6, 2007 18:13:07 GMT -6
The Adler Planetarium is a giant dome on the lake shore. It's right next to what used to be Meig's Field, a tiny airport right in Downtown Chicago. The first things we saw were these ancient books on astronomy. How cool is that? I'm a fan of books, and even though I couldn't read these particular ones, there was certainly a feeling of respect that had made it that far.
A lot of the museum's exhibit was made up of devices historically used to demonstrate and teach the movement of the stars in the sky. It was pretty neat to see. With the changing ideas of why the stars moved, and what exactly they were, the tools changed with it.
I guess the most modern example of this would be the actual planetarium itself. It's a big dome that you sit under, and look up at the stars, projected with a giant Carl Zeiss contraption that puts up the stars as they would look at x time, whenever you want that to be.
There was some cool interactive exhibits, and I would have taken more photos of them, because a lot of them were demonstrating properties of light that Astronomers deal with. There were just too many kids. I can't blame them. That's why the exhibits were there. It's not their fault that the mirrors and prisms that they were playing with looked like a ton of fun to me and my camera.
This was cool too, but less playful or photogenic. This is a picture of a giant monitor that is displaying an infrared picture of me taking a picture of the monitor. It was pretty neat, specially how you can tell where my zipper is on my sweater and such. Bonus nachos for cool, but I don't know how effective it is as a teaching tool.
We were able to go down to the new theatre and see a computer animated movie on a dome that takes up most of your field of view. very cool. The movie wasn't the best, but it was very disorienting being in a cartoon, and I give it full marks for that.
Then we went up and saw the planetarium, and got a lecture on the stars visible in Chicago in the winter. Pretty cool. I now know what Subaru is. One other thing that was interesting in the museum was the Space travel exhibit.
They had a lot of Jim Lovell stuff, and it was pretty cool to check out. Some of the notes at the end were the best. I really really really home some of those misspellings were on purpose.
Source: timdesuyo.blogspot.com/2007/02/post-space-suckschicago-vacation-16.html
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A lot of the museum's exhibit was made up of devices historically used to demonstrate and teach the movement of the stars in the sky. It was pretty neat to see. With the changing ideas of why the stars moved, and what exactly they were, the tools changed with it.
I guess the most modern example of this would be the actual planetarium itself. It's a big dome that you sit under, and look up at the stars, projected with a giant Carl Zeiss contraption that puts up the stars as they would look at x time, whenever you want that to be.
There was some cool interactive exhibits, and I would have taken more photos of them, because a lot of them were demonstrating properties of light that Astronomers deal with. There were just too many kids. I can't blame them. That's why the exhibits were there. It's not their fault that the mirrors and prisms that they were playing with looked like a ton of fun to me and my camera.
This was cool too, but less playful or photogenic. This is a picture of a giant monitor that is displaying an infrared picture of me taking a picture of the monitor. It was pretty neat, specially how you can tell where my zipper is on my sweater and such. Bonus nachos for cool, but I don't know how effective it is as a teaching tool.
We were able to go down to the new theatre and see a computer animated movie on a dome that takes up most of your field of view. very cool. The movie wasn't the best, but it was very disorienting being in a cartoon, and I give it full marks for that.
Then we went up and saw the planetarium, and got a lecture on the stars visible in Chicago in the winter. Pretty cool. I now know what Subaru is. One other thing that was interesting in the museum was the Space travel exhibit.
They had a lot of Jim Lovell stuff, and it was pretty cool to check out. Some of the notes at the end were the best. I really really really home some of those misspellings were on purpose.
Source: timdesuyo.blogspot.com/2007/02/post-space-suckschicago-vacation-16.html
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