One Awesome Space (Literally & Figuratively)
Although this building may resemble something out of Stargate (film or series), it is actually the Adler Planetarium (adlerplanetarium.org) in Chicago. The building, the first planetarium in the U.S., was designed by Ernest Grunsfeld, for which he was awarded a gold medal from the American Institute of Architects (his grandson became a NASA astronaut, so there is something Stargateish to this).
The building was opened on May 12, 1930. And in subsequent years there have been a multitude of changes.
Most recently, there is a new Grainger Sky Theater, which, the planetarium claims, projects “the largest single seamless digital image in the world.”
The dome measures 71 ft. in diameter. Adler contracted with Global Immersion (globalimmersion.com) to undertake the development of the digital capability in the Grainger Sky Theater.
Global Immersion deployed its proprietary Fidelity Black 8K display product that utilizes a 20-channel hyper-array of Zorro projectors from Rockwell Collins (rockwellcollins.com; yes, the company that builds systems for the aerospace market—both commercial and military). The projectors provide a display resolution in excess of 8.3 k; it is capable of running at both 30 and 60 frames per second at 8k resolution. Behind the scenes there are servers (the projectors are backed by 46 computers) that are using 42 NVIDIA Quadro graphic processing units (nvidia.com).
While none of that may resonate, consider it this way: a high-quality theater provides a 2 k x 4 k-pixel screen resolution. According to the people at Adler, the 8k x 8k pixel resolution of the Grainger Sky Theater is so real that it “can only be surpassed by actual space travel.”
Given that the Adler Planetarium reopened on July 8, 2011, the same day the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched for the final Shuttle program mission, we’ll have to take their word for that,
as it is likely that our membership in the astronaut corps isn’t going to be activated anytime soon.
