The next day we visited the Adler Planetarium, the first and oldest in the Americas.
It looks like a cross between an ancient Sumerian temple and a SETI telescope. You don't know what an ancient Sumerian temple looks like, but that's for the better - nobody will prove me wrong.
But you can definitely find out what the telescope of the famous search for extraterrestrial intelligence project looks like. And compare.
The planetarium was opened in 1930 with money from philanthropist Max Adler
The planetarium is located in the Museum Campus park, where several museums are situated next to each other - besides the planetarium, there's also the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum Of Natural History, a name I didn't risk translating for fear of falling into literalism. What is meant is that it's a natural science museum, and the exhibits are often swiped from excavations. To go to these museums, we bought the Chicago City Pass - a set of several tickets to different places for a bundle price lower than individually. The concept is popular, there's one for Wisconsin Dells too, where we went a week later. It's nice that holders of such passes walk in like royalty - without waiting in line, and there's a special word for this, but I forgot it, so look for it in the comments, hopefully the locals will remember.
Before the visit, all my ideas about planetariums were limited to an episode of South Park, where the town planetarium lost its popularity. To restore it, children were brainwashed using the projector into constantly returning and luring in new victims. In reality, things turned out to be not nearly as grim. Besides the planetarium itself, the building houses an astronomy and space museum, as well as a cool cinematic ceiling in the shape of a hemisphere - a system known as a fulldome theater. It was my first time seeing one, but there aren't many of them in the US either.
And from this angle it looks like a Jew in a kippah
The planetarium museum wasn't bad - they let you remotely drive a model of a Mars rover (or a lunar rover? my memory is full of holes), showed the scale of the planets as spheres hanging from the ceiling (though I've already posted them), and let you press buttons in educational computer games - which a pig will always find mud is always a joy for a programmer. I'm glad there are quite a few of these interactive installations in US museums, and many of them have touchscreens. When the time came, we went to two shows, as they call them here.
The first one was the starry sky of Illinois. There they told us what the bear/dipper is and how to find the North Star using the bear. I tried it a few times later - works without a hitch. That's what a good visual aid means. Then they spun the sky around so we'd know what it looks like in different seasons. The bright and excellent image on the giant dome was provided by a grandiose device in the center of the room, looking like an alien in an ancient diving suit, which majestically spun and moved in different directions during the show.
The Adler Planetarium projector.
Interestingly, a young girl narrated the live presentation about the stars and did it very smoothly - she didn't stumble once, except for the times when she was interrupted by schoolchildren of the breed that shall not be named, whom we had the misfortune of running into. By the way, what's curious is that the North Star changes over time - the ancient Egyptians considered a different star to be the North Star than we do. The complex astronomical reasoning for this is beyond the scope of this post. (That's an excuse from a guy who is extremely weak in astronomy).
The second show was a film about black holes, the most popular among the planetarium's films. The whole movie was thoroughly permeated with the beloved American pathos and emotional build-up in the form of an expressive voice-over, designed to set off the mighty special effects showing the center of the galaxy and distant nebulas. Curiously, before that, in the trailer for another film, I noticed that the voice belonged to Laurie Anderson. Now it makes sense how the composer made a living before she got famous.
In the basement of the planetarium, there was a presentation about astronomy in different eras, complete with costumes. And this is my sister.
Before the movies, we had lunch at Galileo's Cafe, which means "At Galileo's". In general, Americans really love such names, if I haven't mentioned that already. Just think of some of the places we've been to - Macy's, Hoolihan's, Culver's, Kohl's, and Woodman's (more on the last four later). Obviously, what plays a role here is both the fact that many companies were founded by a single person, and the fact that such a name looks more human and therefore more attractive from a marketing perspective. By the way, the planetarium building stands on a long artificial causeway, from which you get a very good view of the Loop. That's what they call in Chicago what is usually called downtown in other cities. In Russian, it simply means the business center.
A rare occasion when I gave in to the tradition of taking a photo in front of some famous crap
As you can see, the buildings in these photos aren't brown, like I tried to convince everyone in the last post. But everyone's forgotten about that a long time ago and they won't catch me on my exaggerations, since the lifespan of a post in human memory is short. Besides, the color of the lake is different even between these two shots - let alone the last post, which by LiveJournal standards is in a completely different era of time.
My t-shirt is riding up because a crazy strong wind is blowing. But it's not cold at all, since the temperature is around 26 degrees, if not higher. And I'm squinting because the sun is very bright and completely unfamiliar to a programmer. Check out the text on the shirt - twice Americans got absolutely thrilled and smiled several other times.
Photo from the Burning Man festival
By the way, near the planetarium you could pay to ride the famous Segway, a two-wheeled electric scooter for geeks, I mean, fans of all things techno. But this required a significant amount of time and a less blinding sun, otherwise I'd have rolled straight into Lake Michigan, despite all its computers and gyroscopes. By the way, they say Segway's business has taken a turn for the better this year - which is no surprise, with fuel at $5 a gallon and oil at $142 a barrel. I've even seen a Segway in old Riga though, where it bounced comically on the cobblestones. And rumor has it, some hacker built himself the exact same thing out of spare parts in a week, instead of paying $5000 for the original.
After visiting the planetarium, we walked across Millennium Park at Tanya's invitation to head to the Grand Lux Cafe restaurant, but that's a topic for a new post.