March 6th Weekend: Adler Planetarium

We're a little bit ashamed by the fact that as astrophysicists who have been living in chicago for the last 3+ years, we've never been to the Planetarium.
Finally!
There's a lot of collaboration between Adler and our department at the university of chicago. researchers volunteer to come to the museum and give informal talks, as well as take part in crating parts of the material that's been shown to the public. We plan to join this program sometime soon - public outreach is an important part of astronomy. I actually miss that a lot, i used to do a lot of public outreach in israel and just about none since we moved to chicago.

anyway, this weekend we got to take Gary, Sandy and Ella to the Planetarium, to explore and get a feel of what those public talks (that we will be volunteering for) are about.

We all had a good time, including Ella. I think i speak for everybody when i say that our favorite part was the "Cosmic Collisions" show - it's projected on the inside of a dome using state-of-the-art digital projectors. Ella was excited about it too! she didn't interrupt (but kicked the back of the seat in front of us a couple of times... sorry...) and didn't fall asleep. she even reached for the sun :)

after the show we came across this bottom-lit glass floor, and Ella was introduced to the solar system (and friends) for the first time.