“Welcome to the Universe” at Adler Planetarium | Review

Much like the Adler Planetarium’s original star shows, a live person dictates the newest Grainger Theater show, “Welcome to the Universe.” Unlike the 1930s iterations, this one uses gaming-system-like technology to zoom around outer space. What you see is mostly real: It’s data taken from satellite and telescopes, and made into visual images. Take a spin around Earth, note the paths where satellites travel, race into a dense globular cluster of stars, and from there look at the distant Milky Way. The trip back to Earth feels epic—you’re a speck of dust on a speck of dust in the universe. But the best part is playing astronaut, peering at large environmental events on Earth; for this, Adler swaps in new data weekly. We witnessed a volcano, recorded by a NASA satellite, forming an island in the Red Sea.