Adler Planetarium - also on the GoCard

If you ever get the chance to visit Chicago - make sure you check out the Adler Planetarium. They had an eclipse viewing party the night of the lunar eclipse.  They have a lakefront scaled Solar System- the sun is outside the planetarium, the inner solar system is along the lakefront  on Museum campus (where the planetarium, aquarium and natural history museum are located) then north or south along the lake shore the our planets have markers.

Outside there is a statue of Copernicus , facing him are a series of heads on pikes (amused me) of the constellations of the Chinese zodiac.  I got my picture with the horse - clearly the coolest!

 
Around the dome of the building (which part is inside part outside) are the Western zodiac constellations... clearly I had to take scorpius

They had a great collection of antique telescopes, how cute is the Mars Rover??

The Angie and I on an infrared viewer

They have something called an Atwood sphere.  Very cool - it shows the night sky in 1913, via 692 holes drilled in the surface that the light from the top shines through.  Brighter stars have bigger holes so appear brighter (sadly you can no longer see most of the stars for real in actual Chicago at night because of light pollution )  The sphere spins, so  you see an entire year of the night sky.  The guides have a light projector that superimposes the constellations etc onto the sphere.  There is a sled, that held maybe 10? people plus the guide that rides up into the sphere!!  Seriously cool!

 
 
 We got to the planetarium late in the afternoon, and missed the Destination Solar System Show, but we did manage to catch the Skywatch Live show.