Coming to the Museum over the holiday weekend? Remember to stop by the Museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space on 81st Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West for a unique type of space show. Bright green waves of laser light will ripple across the Hayden Sphere from 5 to 11 pm every evening until Sunday, November 27, to illustrate how the Hubble Space Telescope analyzes distant galaxies, quasars, and other celestial objects in the universe—and to mark the opening of Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, the Museum’s latest special exhibition.

Call it the antithesis of Grey Gardens. While that famous documentary showed how Hamptons socialite Edith Beale and her daughter oversaw the eponymous estate’s slide into squalor, the inhabitants of the 17th-century monastery in Portugal at the heart of Convento, a selection at this year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival, lovingly resurrected a ruin into a home full of life and art.

Tomorrow, a producer with Science Bulletins, the Museum’s online and exhibition program, begins a seven-day journey to the South Pole to document the work of a research team working with the largest-ever telescope deployed in Antarctica.

Over a year ago, Rachel braved cold winds and snow to study winter insects called gallflies, winning a 2010 Young Naturalist Award for the research essay she wrote about their complex life cycles. In the summer, Rachel set out again—this time, to search cow pastures for coprophilous beetles, known commonly as dung beetles, which would become the subject of another research project.

Imagine a mirror as wide as a football field at the South Pole of the Moon. Instead of polished glass, its surface is made of a reflective liquid, which spins in a circle.

Scientists hope to make this vision into a reality one day by using a liquid mirror to build a giant lunar telescope that would allow astronomers to see farther into the universe than ever before. In the Museum’s special exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, visitors can see two liquid mirror telescopes: one featured as part of a Moonscape diorama, the other, an interactive model that can be operated with the push of a button.