Header Image: Person sitting at a desk with their laptop on Adler Zooniverse website homepage. 2022. As kids, some of us would look up at the Moon and hope one day we could step foot on it. Maybe you dreamed of blasting off into space on a rocketship as a NASA astronaut or becoming a […]

Header Image: Rotating Earth model seen in the Adler Planetarium’s Our Solar System exhibit. March 2022. Every planet in our solar system has its charms. Jupiter’s a great one if you’re into enormously destructive storms that have been raging for hundreds of years. Saturn has those pretty rings. But if you enjoy breathing, eating, and […]

Header Image: A person looking through the Doane Observatory telescope at the Adler Planetarium. Have you ever attempted to search the internet for a specific thing, but found that no matter what you typed in the search bar you couldn’t find what you were looking for? The same problem can happen when searching digital collections! […]

Did you know that anyone (that means YOU) can become a citizen scientist? If you’re reading this, you already have everything you need to contribute to real research projects—and maybe even discover something no one knew they were looking for! April is Citizen Science Month, and you can celebrate by joining the millions of Adler […]

Image Caption: Adler Zooniverse project Health Record Hiccups analyzes graphs like this one to look for unexpected changes in health data over time. I’m not a statistician, a doctor, an elected official, or a very-recent-historian, but I would bet at least a couple of my vital organs that most of us have paid more attention to […]

Header Image: Help researchers complete 8 different Adler Zooniverse citizen science projects while traveling the universe with Adler Space Tours! Summer plans looking a little sad this year? I have good news: There are more places in space than you could visit in a million summers—not including travel time. And you can explore a few […]

Header Image: This celestial globe from the Adler Planetarium’s collection shows the 88 constellations and their corresponding boundaries—which are the light blue lines on the surface of this globe—defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).  On January 10, 2016, I was among the millions of music fans who staggered at the news that David Bowie […]

Header Image: Constellation being classified from the Mapping Historic Skies project. Mapping Historic Skies Team: Jessica BrodeFrank, Pedro Raposo, Sam Blickhan, Becky Rother, and Cliff Johnson. The Adler Planetarium opened its new exhibit, Chicago’s Night Sky, in November 2019. This exhibit features real science and research from several of the Adler’s program initiatives, including Far […]

Header Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies, were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” ― Carl Sagan Even if you’re just a novice space enthusiast, I’m sure you’ve heard some variation of […]

Thanks to a unique partnership between the Adler and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, 1.7 million people around the world are participating in frontier research, digitizing vast archives of historical documents, and even helping route supplies to hurricane survivors. Zooniverse was born more than a decade ago from a desire to make […]