August 13 -- Planetarium

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The Planetarium has multiple theaters, and multiple shows in two out of three of them.  I asked the guy who sold me my ticket for recommendations, and he suggested I go to Skywatch Live at 1:15 and Cosmic Wonder at 2:30, so that's what I did.

Because they change up the times of the shows often, it's not worth it to print the schedules.  So the suggestion is that you take a pic of the day's schedule with your smart phone, and then refer to that for info on when the different shows are available.  The guy who sold me my ticket wrote the times of the shows he recommended for me, on a paper map, on the appropriate locations.  Just as well -- then I didn't have to try to find the above image of the schedule in my phone!



I had some time before the first show, so I wandered around....  I hope this is legible -- it's full of fascinating info.  (as always, click on an image to embiggen)

Oxygen, sodium, iron, carbon ... all "forged in the interiors of the stars themselves."  Wow........



As I wandered, I happened across the Community Design Lab.  The project on the 13th was to try to make a space capsule that would protect a marshmallow from vacuum (or, at least, a whole lot less pressure than we experience at sea-level on earth).

Of course this is an impossible task, given duct tape and plastic cups as building materials, but I gave it a try.

I put a few rubber bands on the outside of the cup to help it not expand.  (I don't know if this was a good idea, or if it helped at all).  I cut a cardboard circle the size of the rim of a plastic cup, and duct-taped it to the cup, "sealing" the marshmallow inside its capsule.  I ran some strips of duct tape all the way around, vertically, and then wrapped more duct tape around the bottom edge.  (The guy running the vacuum chamber told us that every manned space mission has had duct tape on board.  Of course they did/do.  :-)  )

At least it looks sort of like a space capsule, yes?  With plenty of windows! 

The vacuum chamber was transparent, so we could see our poor little marshmallows expanding as the air inside them expanded, as the pressure on their outsides decreased.

Mine expanded less than some of the attempts made by other visitors, so I'm taking that as victory.

When the pressure returned to normal (same as the pressure in the rest of the room), the marshmallows were smaller than before they were exposed to vacuum.  I wonder if that means the air bubbles inside them collapsed and no longer hold the marshmallow up the way they did before?

In this next image, you can see from the slime on the inside of the cup that the marshmallow used to be bigger than it now is....

Wow, that was pretty fun!


Ooops -- forgot to think about the time -- now I have to hustle off to see the Skywatch show!

The Skywatch show was pretty fun, too.  All about the Chicago night sky (with a plea for less light pollution, and a contention that we could light the ground adequately while doing a much better job of NOT polluting the night sky with light).  The presenter talked about constellations and other star groupings that can be seen in the Chicago sky at various times of year.  It was interesting.  Ann Arbor's sky is pretty similar to Chicago's -- some of what she said was new to me, and some was familiar.  I enjoyed it.

I didn't have much time between shows, so I wandered on toward the other presentation space.  I saw sundials big and small, and other instruments intended for using celestial information to guide us here on Earth.

The Cosmic Wonder show was interesting, too.  For part of it, we were taken through a 3-D map of the actual placement of a million stars.  Not much of what there really is, when each galaxy is billions of stars, and there are billions of galaxies.  (!!!)  But cool.

He talked about the Hubble telescope, and showed us a lot of amazing images taken by Hubble. 

I think of Hubble fondly -- there were Hubble images in Second Life, back when I used to go there, and I made myself a shirt out of one of them.  Here I am, in my Hubble-image shirt, sitting on (or near?) an art chair, holding an art cat.  This is not much like my Real Self.  I don't want to take care of long hair in Real Life!  And I couldn't figure out how to make the hair be gray, so I was left with the original brown of this hair as someone else designed it.

I really do wear black jeans, and I would really wear this Hubble-image shirt, if it existed in Real Life.....

Back to Real Life, and the Real Planetarium.

The chairs in the Planetarium's theaters tip back, so you can better see the dome overhead.  It's dark.  Two shows, basically in a row, and I was falling asleep at the end of the second one.  Oops.

I decided more shows right then was not a good idea, and found the cafeteria for a snack.  I had a cooked-brussels-sprout salad, with slices of toasted almonds and a bunch of other ingredients I wouldn't expect to find to eat in a mass-market sort of venue.  It wasn't amazingly tasty, but at least it was mostly good for me, I think.  And I appreciate their giving me a choice of something other than fries and burgers!



One of the things I love about Chicago is that you can see the iconic buildings from here, there, nearly everywhere, and orient yourself accordingly..............  You could see Chicago from the hotel we used to go to for the big Chicago-area quilt show, near O'Hare airport.....

Here's the view from my table in the Planetarium cafe.  We can tell we are looking north....

As you can see, we are in a space that is much newer than the bulk of the Planetarium.  I guess the relatively-horizontal glass you can see behind the flower, above, sticks out over the walkway along the shore -- I think the two women in this much closer crop of the above are on the walkway.....

You can rent a bicycle for 24 hours -- maybe some day I'll see how far south you can bike from Grant Park, along the edge of the lake...........



Now we are looking west through the cafe, at some other familiar things.  The Field Museum, that set of tall blue buildings, and the Aquarium.....

Wandering on the top level of the Planetarium, looking at the stairway I came up to get to this level.  The Planetarium is all over promoting science in many ways.

I think I have this one covered.............  Not quite every day, but almost!

Wandering on -- I discovered (THANK GOODNESS), completely randomly, that they have a piece of Mars you can touch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  WOW!!!!!

It's in an exhibit on the top floor called Our Solar System.  If you click through, the vertical red/orange thing, with a white cylindrical bottom, standing alone on the right, is the set-up holding the Mars rock, the screen in the image below, and the buttons to start the different videos.

Above is a video screen, which shows various videos, depending on which button you push.  (I should have gotten a pic of the set-up.  Sigh.)  The videos are of a scientist, introducing her-/himself, or answering various questions, like "How did this hunk of rock get to the Planetarium?" or "How do we know it's from Mars?"

It was interesting to see the person in the video give the answers -- more ... engaging? ... than reading a blurb about it.

Are you dying for the answers?  This hunk of rock is part of a bigger hunk that was knocked loose from Mars ("300,000,000 years ago"!) by an impact from some other body, like an asteroid.  The hunk of Mars rock floated around in the the solar system for a very long time (I can't remember how long she said), and then, randomly, happened to land on Earth.  And someone found it, and knew it was significant.  Doesn't all of that seem vanishingly unlikely?  It does to me.....  How amazing that we have it.

And amazing that they believe they know what it is!  They believe it came from Mars because the chemical content of the rock is right for Mars, and ... because there are microscopic bubbles of atmosphere in the rock.  !!!  That atmosphere would be totally weird for Earth, but it matches perfectly with Mars.  !!!

(If they answered "how do we know it left Mars 300,000,000 years ago?", or "how we know what the atmosphere was on Mars back then?", I either didn't hear the answers, or don't remember.......)



And now, for the piece de resistance -- Moi, touching a piece of Mars!!!  Wow!!!  So cool......................  :-)

They also have a piece of moon rock.  I have touched moon rock before, at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.  You bet I touched it again, but it wasn't *quite* as cool as doing so the first time.....

The answer to "how did they know this one was from the moon?" was different.  The moon rock in Washington was hand-carried to Earth from the moon by US astronauts.  No possible doubt where that one came from!

This one -- the scientist in the videos said they knew this one was from the moon because it matches the composition of the rocks the astronauts brought back from the moon.  So there you have it.  (I believe this one arrived here on Earth similarly to the way the Mars rock got here.

It seems so unlikely that rocks knocked loose from other planets would land here, and then, at least as unlikely that we would find them.  Then -- that we would recognize them as significant AND figure out that they came from another planet?

I'm astonished -- ASTONISHED!!! -- that all of that ever comes together.  Let alone that it has all come together, many times.  !!!  Astonished, and very glad.  :-)



Moi, touching a piece of the moon.........

Excellent!

They also have pieces they believe are from asteroids Ceres (so big it is the size of a dwarf planet) and Vesta ("one of the biggest objects in the asteroid belt"; "the size of a minor planet").  I touched 'em, but did not record it.



The set-up holding the rocks was sort of interesting.  There was a thick plexiglas box-contraption around each rock, with a magnifying glass embedded in the top, so you could look through that at the rock.  Both of the  pics above were taken through the magnifying glasses.

Then there were holes cut through the plexiglas box's sides, through which you could stick your fingers and touch the rock.  In this next image, we're looking through one of those holes at the moon rock.

And now we're looking through the magnifying glass at the moon rock.  Just getting to look at rock from outer space?  Pretty darn cool. 

And -- getting to touch pieces of rock that came from outer space???  !!!!!  I mean -- !!!!!!!!!!!!!  Very extremely totally cool.

Wow.  And to think I didn't know I could do that, and could easily have missed it.  I know there are a multitude of amazing things I did not do in the places in Chicago I visited, let alone all the places I did not go............

Wow.   Must. Come. Back. To. Chicago.


Ok, moving on................................................


Here are some overhead planets in the Solar System exhibit.  Above is Saturn, and the other one is Jupiter (which, yes, does have rings, only they are dark, unlike Saturn's bright shiny ones, so we didn't know they were there until relatively recently).

This graphic, also on the top level of the Planetarium, is amazing and wonderful. I took the pic because I liked the artistry, but looking at it "on the big screen" -- it's much better than "just" the artistry.

It's on a cylinder, so it's hard to photograph. 

Each one of the lines coming out from the Earth is a mission to space.  The dark lines are failed missions; the bright ones are successes.

Here's part of the info about missions to the moon.......

I love the way this graphic shows how they used the gravity of the planets to sling-shot satellites faster, on out into space.  If you look back at that original most-of-this-graphic, above, you can see the light blue and light purple lines going on out to the far reaches of the solar system.........

Is all of that cool, or what???  If I were back there, I would totally get more pics of this.  And I would check to see if they had a poster in the gift shop...................



At some point, I was looking out the windows of the Planetarium, and I saw people on the beach.  People!  On the beach!  Right near where I was!

I knew there were beaches north of Navy Pier, but I did not know about the 12th Street Beach.

The minute I finished at the Planetarium, I wanted to head for the beach!!!

I wandered around some more.

I visited the gift shop, and got some socks with constellations on them.

Including my favorite constellation -- Orion.  I used to look up at Orion when I walked home from baby-sitting, when I was in junior high school......

They had some small bags made with Hubble images!  I would surely have purchased a tote bag, had it been made with Hubble images, even if it had been made of the same plastic fabric the small bags were made from.  But I don't have much use for a random small bag, alas.  I should look and see if I can find Hubble-image fabric online.........................

I bought some postcards, in addition to the socks, and that was it for my shopping on the 13th.



I noticed this piece of rock, just part of the wall inside the planetarium, and thought it looked like galaxies.....

And then I headed for the beach!


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