photo from  Prashanth Sriram’s photostream on Flickr

The website of  Chicago’s Adler Planetarium says, “As visitors approach the exhibition, they are greeted by a full-size replica of a familiar giant stone monolith from Stonehenge.” Do we forgive them for using the word monolith where trilithon is the correct term? We’ll think about it.

But they do have this rather nice depiction of a piece of that ancient megalithic circle we all know and love. We don’t know what it’s made of, but we’re guessing fiberglass. It  looks a little like a movie set Stonehenge.

Plenty of planetariums have some form of Stonehenge replica (remember Kuala Lumpur?), but we’ve had our eye on Chicago for a while because of the structure on the left, entitled America’s Courtyard, an outdoor stone spiral that some people refer to as Stonehenge. (Photo by Mike Boehmer) You can read more about this public sculpture here at the sculptors’ page. (Please forgive them their typos. They are Brazilian, and English is not their first language.) Here’s another page about it, and a photo of it in the snow.

We’ve always liked that sculpture and couldn’t work it in (not hengy enough!)  until we found the photo at the top. Of course, Chicago is better known for its remarkable sculpture Cloud Gate. If you visit, we recommend seeing both!

But back to the trilithon, which now seems rather mundane. We’re giving it 5½ druids. We’re glad the planetarium is helping to keep people Stonehenge conscious. It’s as if trilithons were big staples for stapling the sky to the landscape. Oh, those ancients–they worked in big cubicles!