TOP TEAM
DEEP SPACE ADVENTURE
A REVOLUTIONARY WAY TO EXPLORE THE UNIVERSE LAUNCHED AT ADLER PLANETARIUM, CHICAGO IN JULY. KATHLEEN WHYMAN VENTURES INTO SPACE WITH THE TOP TEAM
PAUL KNAPPENBERGER president
What was the inspiration for the project?
Adler Planetarium in Chicago, US was the fi rst planetarium in the western hemi- sphere to open outside of Europe. Five years ago we celebrated its 75th anniver- sary. Rather than saying, “wow, look at all the stuff we’ve done in the last 75 years,” we took the occasion to ask, “what should we be doing in the next 75 years to better serve the audiences that come to visit us?” We thought it was time to signifi cantly
transform Adler back into the leading theatre in the world, which it was when it opened in the 1930s, and inspire people to want to explore space for themselves. The result is the $14m (£9m, 10.30m), 40-minute gallery and planetarium experi- ence Deep Space Adventure.
What is Deep Space Adventure?
If anyone wants the experience of fl ying out to space, this is the only place in the world at the moment where you can see this. The centrepiece is the Grainger Sky
Theater, which presents a journey through the universe. Designed to resemble the observation deck of a star ship, visitors fl y through space and visit unimaginably beautiful and strange things that are going on out there in the universe.
What’s the Welcome gallery?
The Welcome Gallery is intended to get people to stop thinking about the traffi c they had to encounter in the parking lot, and everything else that’s in our day-to-day world, and begin to think about the vast- ness and mysteriousness of space. There are no right angles in the gallery – all surfaces are curved. Embedded in
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those surfaces are four interactives, which offer ways of exploring space. We don’t anticipate people being in there for more than 10 minutes before the gallery morphs into a pre-show experience. This causes a transformation within the room with light- ing and video displays. We have a very innovative way of mov- ing people from the gallery into the theatre. They enter through a black hole – a space portal – and go down a long tunnel with pulsing lights. When they pop out at the other end they’re in the new, huge theatre.
What’s the content?
The Welcome Gallery’s interactives help set the stage for how to explore space. In the theatre we selected some of the most
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dramatic, celestial environments that we know about in space and fl y people to them, so they can observe them. We see a collision between two huge galaxies and watch the black hole that is the centre of our galaxy – the Milky Way – shred a star that’s falling into it. Another we chose was a binary star where two stars orbit each other. One is a Red Giant, which is a huge, very bloated star and the other is a compact White Dwarf. Gas from the Red Giant streams out onto the surface of the White Dwarf and accumulates as fuel onto its surface. At a certain point, there’s so much fuel that the White Dwarf explodes. These are all very dramatic events that
are going on in space. The visualisation for our dome is based on real data – these
AM 4 2011 ©cybertrek 2011 Adler’s original 1930s architecture has been retained despite the content being updated DESIGNED TO RESEMBLE THE OBSERVATION DECK OF A STAR SHIP,
VISITORS FLY THROUGH SPACE AND VISIT UNIMAGINABLY BEAUTIFUL AND STRANGE THINGS THAT ARE OUT THERE IN THE UNIVERSE
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