Tuesday, January 24 11:15 am
Create a Space Show in Digital Universe Flight School. © AMNH
Imagine creating your very own Space Show and then seeing it presented on the dome of the Hayden Planetarium. That’s the thrill in store for a select group of 20 middle school students who participate in the Museum’s first-ever Digital Universe Flight School this February.
Over the course of one week, 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade students will discover how to navigate to planets in the solar system and beyond using the Museum’s Digital Universe Atlas, a three-dimensional, scientifically accurate map of the cosmos, and learn about how the atlas is built. As a final project, students will use sophisticated gaming laptops to create a digital tour to their favorite spot of the universe—Mars, a nebula, the spiral galaxies—which will be shown in a special evening program in the Hayden Planetarium on Friday, February 24.
Taught by an earth scientist and an astrophysics teacher, the course will run from 9 am to 4 pm from Monday, February 20, through Friday, February 24, a schedule that coincides with the New York City public school midwinter break. (The program will be repeated from July 9 to 13 to give the same chance to students whose break falls at a different time.) Read more »
Thursday, November 10 1:20 pm
Starting November 14, waves of laser light will ripple across the Hayden Sphere to illustrate how the Hubble Space Telescope analyzes distant celestial objects. Artistic rendering courtesy of Space Telescope Science Institute.
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.
The laser art, From the Distant Past, was created by German artist Tim Otto Roth in collaboration with astronomer Bob Fosbury, the former head of the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility. The installation resembles the squiggly line of an electrocardiogram. Behind the luminous pattern is a message: astronomical telescopes produce more than just beautiful pictures of the sky.
From the Distant Past is based on data captured by Hubble’s spectrometers, advanced instruments that act like prisms, separating light from the cosmos into its constituent colors. This provides a spectrum “fingerprint” of the object being observed, which, once decoded, tells scientists about its temperature, chemical composition, and motion, key indicators in understanding the development and age of the universe. Hubble’s spectrometers are especially skilled at hunting for black holes, volumes of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Read more »
Wednesday, October 19 2:00 pm
The Rose Center for Earth and Space. © AMNH/D. Finnin.
With the conclusion of NASA’s shuttle program and the upcoming launch of the latest Mars rover, the future of space exploration is once again a hot topic—and humans’ first steps on the Moon are all the more important to revisit.
On October 25, join Apollo historian Andrew Chaikin and the Museum’s Director of Astrovisualization Carter Emmart for October’s Astronomy Live program, Fly Me to the Moon. The evening begins at 6:30 pm and includes a flight simulation to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor using the latest data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, along with mapping photographs taken from lunar orbit by the Apollo astronauts 40 years ago.
Chaikin recently answered a few questions about his passion for space exploration.
You spent years interviewing the Apollo astronauts for your book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. What are some of the lessons of the Apollo missions?
In some ways, the most important lesson from Apollo is that when we tackle the difficult challenges of exploration, we reap unanticipated benefits. One of those benefits is heightened awareness. The astronauts who went to the Moon found that it was the Earth that made the greatest impression on them, with its spectacular beauty and inexplicable sense of fragility. Through their eyes, we can see our planet as a world to be protected and cherished. It’s no surprise that Apollo jump-started the environmental movement in this country. Read more »
Tags: Andrew Chaikin, Apollo, Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, Carter Emmart, Hayden Planetarium, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Moon, NASA, Rose Center for Earth and Space
Category: AMNH News, Q&A, Science
Tuesday, July 05 10:40 am
The celestial phenomenon Manhattanhenge returns next week to gives denizens a dazzling view of the setting Sun perfectly aligned with the city’s grid.
Join Jackie Faherty, a research scientist in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics, for a special preview in the Hayden Planetarium on Tuesday, July 12. The program will include a visual explanation of Manhattenhenge using the state-of-the-art Zeiss Mark IX star projector and the Museum’s Digital Universe atlas, a four-dimensional atlas of the cosmos.
Before sunset on July 12 and 13, position yourself looking west on such clear cross streets as 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, and 57th, among others, to watch for striking photographic opportunities as the Sun drops to the horizon across the Hudson River.
Share your photographs with the Museum by uploading them to Flickr and tagging them “Manhattanhenge” for a chance to win two tickets to an Astronomy Live program in the Hayden Planetarium. Photos must be posted by 11:59 pm on Thursday, July 14, to be considered. The Museum’s panel of judges, led by Director of the Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson, will select one winner.
Manhattanhenge takes its name from the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.
Thursday, June 23 12:48 pm
This image of the Milky Way over New York City is shown using the new projection system on one side (left of the red line) and the previous system on the other side (right of the red line). Image: © AMNH/D. Finnin.
As dazzling as Hayden Planetarium programs have always been, their impact has been magnified many-fold by a recent $2 million upgrade. In essence, the projection system has caught up with the science, making it possible for audiences to see thousands of stars that astrophysicists had been able to identify and even include in various space visualizations but which didn’t show up on the dome’s surface because of technological constraints.
A key feature of the new system is the ability to convey true black as well as allowing for brighter colors, which translates into many more visible stars. The upgrade increased the video projector’s contrast ratio between light and dark to 500,000 to 1. (By comparison, most movie theater projectors have a ratio of only 2,000 to 1.) The new system will also be able to project 10-bit color—a major technological leap that required Museum engineers to develop a new file format, in addition to reconfiguring and building new servers. The result is greater depth of color and smoother, more natural-looking color gradients.
The improved effect of the new projection system was vividly apparent at a trial run in the Hayden Planetarium earlier this month when a projection from the previous system was shown side by side with one from the upgrade. One half of the dome showed a darkened sky with the a view of the Sun, a smattering of stars, and a few trails of interstellar gases; the other, newer projection showed the Sun surrounded by a veritable explosion of stars, gas trails, and dense, cloud-like masses of stars easily recognizable as part of the Milky Way.
Whether used in presentations of the Museum’s Digital Universe—a detailed, four-dimensional atlas of the cosmos— or the Museum’s Space Shows, the new projection system offers a more accurate view of the universe.
