Enjoy the spectacle of the starry sky as you experience Far Out Fridays at the Adler Planetarium on the first Friday of every month! Scope out the many activities including educational activities for children and families, telescope viewing of the night sky, unlimited shows in the historic Sky Theater and Definiti® Space Theater, periodic lectures by leading space science specialists and Adler astronomers, and Doane Observatory tours.

Learn how to use your new or old telescope. Bring your scope with you and Adler staff and volunteers will help you set it up and practice using it (weather permitting). Check out activities in the CyberSpace Classroom including Who Wants to be a Martian? trivia game show.

Far Out Friday will be following the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) monthly themes:

February - Moon
March - Saturn
April - Messier 51
May - The Sun
June - Hercules Cluster (M13)
July - The Milky Way
August - The Perseids
September - Jupiter
October - Andromeda (M31)
November - Crab Nebula
December - Orion Nebula

The lectures below are included as part of Far Out Friday admission. Advance registration is not available, and lecture-only admission is not available. Seating is first come, first served.

The story of the Hubble Space Telescope is a story of many near deaths and amazing saves. Repeatedly, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and even astronomers made passionate efforts to stop its construction or terminate its use. Repeatedly, these efforts failed, as even those who opposed the telescope found that they could not resist its allure. The compelling nature of the unknown that the telescope promised to unveil won out each time, beating back every form of opposition or skepticism while simultaneously compelling the telescope's supporters to make sacrifices surprising even to themselves.

In describing this heroic and unknown story, Mr. Zimmerman will also illustrate how the telescope's design reshaped our concept of how space exploration should be carried out, proving the necessity of having humans and robots work together in space in order for humanity to successfully explore and colonize the solar system. He will also illustrate how the amazing images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope have transformed our understanding of the universe and even reshaped how astronomy is practiced.

Robert Zimmerman is an award-winning science journalist and historian who has written four books and more than a hundred articles on science, engineering, and the history of space exploration and technology. His previous book, Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel (Joseph Henry Press), was awarded the American Astronautical Society's Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award in 2003 as the best space history for the general public.

Everything you know about the Galileo affair is wrong. But the truth doesn't make anyone look any better!

Recent research ties the Galileo trial of 1632 to the politics of the 30 Years War, while the four centuries of conflict over Galileo following that trial have shaped the public conception of what astronomy is, and how it is done. We will examine the politics and the science that fed into the Galileo controversy; the response of scientists and educators in the hundred years following his trial; and what present day conceptions about Galileo have done to our modern understanding of science and its role in society.

Dr. Consolmagno has served as chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society and president of Commission 16 (Planets and Satellites) of the International Astronomical Union. He has been with the Vatican Observatory since 1993, where his research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies. In addition, Dr. Consolmagno curates the Vatican meteorite collection in Castel Gandolfo. Along with more than 100 scientific publications, he is the author of a number of popular books including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), Worlds Apart (with Martha Schaefer), Brother Astronomer, and God's Mechanics.

Copies of God's Mechanics will be available for signing immediately after the talk.

We are privileged to live in a remarkable time. For the first time in human history, we are beginning to glimpse answers to some of our oldest questions: Are there other worlds out there? Are there other solar systems like ours? Do those systems contain Earthlike planets? Do those planets harbor life? Dr. Scott Gaudi will provide a guided tour of the golden age of the exploration of extrasolar worlds and the search for extraterrestrial life, focusing on the hunt for analogs to our solar system, and the search for the 'pale blue dot': another world just like our own.

In the late 1700s, a professional musician became intrigued with astronomy and began building his own telescopes to make observations of the heavens. The instruments were so extraordinary that in short order he discovered the planet Uranus. Along with his sister Caroline, who ultimately became the world's first professional female astronomer, he dramatically expanded our knowledge of what secrets the universe holds. His approach to thinking about the heavens was so revolutionary, in fact, that it still dominates astrophysics to this day.

Michael D. Lemonick spent more than 20 years as a writer for Time magazine, where he produced more than 50 cover stories on science and medicine, and has contributed to Scientific American, New Scientist, Discover, National Geographic and People magazines as well. He has also written four books on astronomy; his latest, The Georgian Star, is a biography of the 18th-century astronomer William Herschel. Lemonick currently teaches journalism at Princeton University. He holds an AB from Harvard College and MSJ from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Copies of The Georgian Star will be available for signing immediately following the presentation.

The general study of the Physics of Elementary Particles and Fields for most people is often constrained by the complex nature of the subject and limited exposure to the basic constructs of the general ideas, language and experimental methods. Planting the ideas of particle physics is fascinating, but sometimes only smashing atomic particles together allows you to harvest the understanding. We are now approaching a new particle accelerator energy frontier in the transition from the Fermilab Tevatron accelerator to the CERN Large Hadron Collider. This presentation will provide an introduction to the basic concepts, some technical apparatus and a perspective on the general scale of particle physics that explores the very small underpinnings of the most fundamental constituents of our very large universe. The new popularity of this academic effort has also spawned new ideas, concerns, and even movies including internet rap music with a physics theme. Dr. White will lead you to this new frontier and bring you up to date on the progress of starting the world's newest particle accelerator.

Dr. Herman B. White has been a particle physics scientist with Fermilab for the past 34 years. He completed undergraduate studies at Earlham College, graduate studies in Nuclear and Accelerator Physics at Michigan State University, and Elementary Particle Physics at Florida State University and Yale University. He was a Resident Research Associate in Nuclear Physics at Argonne National Laboratory, an Alfred P. Sloan travel fellow at the CERN Laboratory, and a University Fellow at Yale. His research has covered a range of topics in Particle and Nuclear Physics, as well as work with accelerators and particle beams. For many years, Dr. White has maintained involvement with many communication efforts to bring information, concerns, and focus about physics and physical science research to the U.S. Congress and governmental agencies in Washington and elsewhere, including service on advisory panels for the U.S. Department of Energy, The National Science Foundation, and The United States National Academies.

On January 1, 1925, the young astronomer Edwin Hubble announced findings that ultimately established that our universe was a thousand trillion times larger than previously believed, filled with myriad galaxies like our own. It was a realization that reshaped how humans understood their place in the cosmos. Six years later, continuing research by Hubble and others forced Albert Einstein to renounce his own cosmic model and finally accept the astonishing fact that the universe was not immobile but instead expanding. The story of these interwoven discoveries includes battles of will, clever insights, and wrong turns made by the early investigators in this great twentieth-century pursuit, from the luminaries (Einstein, Hubble, Harlow Shapley) to the lesser known (such as Henrietta Leavitt, who discovered the means to measure the vast dimensions of the cosmos, and Vesto Slipher, the first and unheralded discoverer of the universe's expansion). In her lecture, Marcia Bartusiak will recount this watershed moment in our cosmic history, describing how Hubble's triumph was achieved only after years of contentious debates over cosmic conjectures that were fiercely disputed.

Marcia Bartusiak has been covering the fields of astronomy and physics for three decades. She is currently a visiting professor in the graduate science-writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has published in Science, Smithsonian, Discover, National Geographic, and Astronomy. Along with The Day We Found the Universe, she is the award-winning author of four other books, including Thursday's Universe, a guide to the frontiers of astrophysics; Through a Universe Darkly, a history of astronomers' quest to discover the universe's composition; and Einstein's Unfinished Symphony, a chronicle of the international attempt to detect cosmic gravity waves. In 2006 she received the American Institute of Physics Gemant Award for her significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, and humanistic dimension of physics.

Copies of The Day We Found the Universe will be available for signing immediately following the presentation.