Adler Planetarium

About

The Adler Planetarium opened on May 12, 1930, as the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere—a gift to Chicago from businessman Max Adler, who had experienced Europe's new planetarium technology and wanted to bring it to the American public. Standing on the Northerly Island peninsula of Chicago's Museum Campus, surrounded on three sides by Lake Michigan and within sight of the city's skyline, it remains one of the most dramatically sited museums in the country. The Adler operates three full-dome theaters: the Grainger Sky Theater, the Johnson Star Maker Simulator, and the Definiti Space Theater—each offering a different immersive experience of the night sky and cosmos. The main theater's digital projection system can recreate the night sky from any point in time and any location on Earth, transporting audiences to the polar ice, ancient Babylon, or the surface of Mars. Audiences also experience live narrated sky shows, where Adler astronomers use the sky to explain real-time astronomical events and engage in direct conversation. The museum's galleries include Our Solar System, Shoot for the Moon (featuring Apollo-era artifacts), Digital Universe, and Space Visualization Laboratory, where researchers create visualizations of real astronomical datasets. The collection of historic telescopes and scientific instruments is among the finest in the world, spanning five centuries of astronomical observation from Galileo's era through the space age. The Adler is an active research institution, with its DotAstronomy conference and citizen science Space Explorers program engaging amateur astronomers and underserved Chicago youth in real research projects. Education programs for schools and homeschool families are available throughout the year.

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