(JUPITER  –  Photo: Travis Rector (U. Alaska Anchorage), Chad Trujillo and the Gemini Altair Team, NOAO / AURA / NSF.)

This is the International Year of Astronomy, recognizing the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of a telescope to study the heavens.

So it’s appropriate that Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and the Alder Planetarium have teamed up to host an exhibit that’s out of this world.

From Earth to the Universe is a collection of more than 50 astronomical images, including planets, comets, starts, nebulae and galaxies.  It’s on view in the pedestrian walkway tunnel near the O’Hare CTA Blue Line station.

The exhibit, which is put together by NASA, also makes use of  Microsoft’s new mobile phone technology, Tag, which allows viewers with an Internet enabled mobile camera phone to photograph the bar code on each image and get information about that image from a special mobile website.

THE FIREWORKS GALAXY
18 million light-years
Photo –  R. Boomsma, T. Oosterloo,  F. Fraternali,  R. Sancisi, M.J.
van der Hulst

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