Post by patrickm on Apr 21, 2013 21:53:19 GMT -6
Last summer we were excited to visit the newly remodeled main theater at Adler, the Grainger Sky Theater, which now houses the world's most advanced astronomical projection system.
www.adlerplanetarium.org/shows/
We took our 17 year old nephew to explore the planetarium with the new show as the main focus. We were all terribly disappointed with the show, which amounted to an animated, "Avatar"-like CGI movie narrated by an imaginary space alien in the future...a cartoon with almost no scientific value that any of us could discern. We all assumed it was meant to attract younger audiences but our nephew seemed to dislike it most of all.
Today we took a trip back to the Adler to see the new movie and explore a few different exhibits. We were very pleasantly surprised by the new, human-narrated show which combined the best of traditional planetarium shows with a panoramic look at the Earth, our solar system, and the universe. The use of the projector was stunning as we travelled faster than light around our galaxy, and visited Mars, Pleiades, and my favorite, the M3 globular cluster before leaving the galaxy. Sitting inside the glob actually made my my eyes well up in wonder.
The show is very good, and our human narrator did a great job helping us understand what we were seeing in a way that people of all ages could easily follow. We are excited to see how they continue to use this valuable resource in new and different ways and are eager to watch what changes the new president brings to the facility. Here's hoping for more outreach.
Only bummer was that the Doane Observatory wasn't open for solar observing on a beautiful spring day.
www.adlerplanetarium.org/shows/
We took our 17 year old nephew to explore the planetarium with the new show as the main focus. We were all terribly disappointed with the show, which amounted to an animated, "Avatar"-like CGI movie narrated by an imaginary space alien in the future...a cartoon with almost no scientific value that any of us could discern. We all assumed it was meant to attract younger audiences but our nephew seemed to dislike it most of all.
Today we took a trip back to the Adler to see the new movie and explore a few different exhibits. We were very pleasantly surprised by the new, human-narrated show which combined the best of traditional planetarium shows with a panoramic look at the Earth, our solar system, and the universe. The use of the projector was stunning as we travelled faster than light around our galaxy, and visited Mars, Pleiades, and my favorite, the M3 globular cluster before leaving the galaxy. Sitting inside the glob actually made my my eyes well up in wonder.
The show is very good, and our human narrator did a great job helping us understand what we were seeing in a way that people of all ages could easily follow. We are excited to see how they continue to use this valuable resource in new and different ways and are eager to watch what changes the new president brings to the facility. Here's hoping for more outreach.
Only bummer was that the Doane Observatory wasn't open for solar observing on a beautiful spring day.
