A celebration of the sky at Adler Planetarium this weekend

A telescope usually comes in handy if you want to get a good look at the planets, stars and other things in outer space that are celebrated at the Adler Planetarium.

But this weekend, the Adler is helping to focus on something you can see just by looking up — at the sky.

The planetarium is taking part in Sky Day, the brainchild of Chicago-based artist Ben Whitehouse.

Whitehouse and Sky Day volunteers will be at the planetarium. There will be videos with images of the sky sent in from all around the world, as well as an art installation and another video installation of astronauts taking part in Sky Day from the International Space Station.

For Sky Day, which was Friday, people were encouraged to submit their pictures to the online gallery or tweet pictures of the sky to be added to an international online gallery, viewable at skydayproject.org. Uploads are still being accepted.

School groups and educators can create their on gallery of pictures on the SkyDayProject website, Whitehouse said.

SkyDay also hosts other initiatives. There’s “Write a Sky-ku!” (rhymes with “haiku”) in which people write short poems about the sky. There’s also “What does the sky mean to you?” which solicits 60-second Instagram videos about the sky.

Whitehouse said he wants people to “take a few minutes and look up at the sky” and “think about how dynamic and precious it is and how much we all depend on it.”

He created Sky Day for all those reasons, he said, and also to promote awareness of climate change.

“We are hoping to make Chicago a beacon to the world,” he said.

Contributing: Almudena Rincon