Adler Planetarium Launching New Ultra High-Def Sky Show
CHICAGO (WBBM) -- The Adler Planetarium has overhauled its sky show from a view of the heavens around Earth to a fly-through of the entire universe since the beginning of time.
The new sky show, "The Deep Space Adventure," is displayed in the new Grainger Sky Theater, which uses 20 projectors and 19 sound channels to take observers on a tour of space since the heavens began.
Adler President Paul Knappenberger says the screen resolution is higher than high-def -- and uses 8K projection, meaning 8 million pixels on the 190-degree screen, actually more detail than can be resolved by someone with 20-20 vision.
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The new sky theater replaces the 40-year-old Zeiss projection system with the long tube with a bulb on the end, which was fine for showing the sky above earth, but was unable to offer extraterrestrial views.
The show "The Searcher" was written by Nick Sagan, son of the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
The show displays the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy and also shows the collision of the Milky Way Galaxy with the Andromeda Galaxy, expected to occur in 3 billion years.
While the show doesn't stake out a formal position on whether there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the narrator of the video is an extraterrestrial himself.
The new show opens Friday at the Planetarium. Admission to the Adler and "The Deep Space Adventure" is $28 for adults, $22 for kids 3 to 11.
