Friday, June 18 12:31 pm
The Museum has launched a cleaning of the Rose Center for Earth and Space’s glass curtain wall, one of the largest in the country, in preparation for its 10th birthday. © AMNH/D. Finnin
The American Museum of Natural History is undertaking a scrub of epic proportions as a team of dusters and window washers completes a thorough cleaning of the Hayden Planetarium Sphere and the monumental glass curtain walls of the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. Cleaning the panels of a 95-foot-high glass cube is a major task that involves squeegee action on almost an acre of glass (36,000 square feet), or 736 individual panes. A large crane lift will take care of the exterior cleaning of the suspended glass curtain wall—one of the largest in the country.
Crews have also recently completed the cleaning of the Hayden Sphere, the cube’s centerpiece, which required workers to rappel down the sphere’s curved surface like mountain climbers.
The Rose Center for Earth and Space will be brought to sparkling-clean condition in preparation for its 10th anniversary celebration on October 10, 2010. In this year of commemorative events, the Rose Center will also offer special Space Show screenings, lectures by scientists from the Museum’s Division of Physical Sciences and elsewhere, programs in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and a star-themed sleepover.
The opening of the $210 million Rose Center in 2000 was one of the most important projects in the history of the Museum and a major milestone in the advancement of science education. The stunning structure, with an 87-foot-diameter sphere that appears to float inside a glass cube, is now a highly recognizable and much-beloved New York City icon. It also serves as a beacon of astrophysical research and education, expanding and enhancing our understanding of profound astronomical concepts such as the origin of the universe and the evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets. For the last decade, the Rose Center has succeeded in bringing the secrets of the universe down to Earth, in large part through the creation of four thrilling Space Shows that use the most sophisticated technologies and feature award-winning narrators Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, and Whoopi Goldberg to bring the latest space science to life for a general audience.
An exciting schedule of space-related public programs is planned for the rest of the year. Check back on amnh.org for more announcements about upcoming Rose Center events in the coming months. Read more »
Thursday, May 27 10:24 am
Sunset looking down 34th Street. One of two days when the sunset is exactly aligned with the grid of streets in Manhattan. Photo © Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2001.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, researches star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the Milky Way’s structure. He recently reminded sky-watchers about an upcoming New York City phenomenon, Manhattanhenge, “one of two days when the sunset is exactly aligned with the grid of streets in Manhattan.”
What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for 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 rose in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.
For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on Sunday, May 30th this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is Monday, July 12th. These two days give you a photogenic view with half the Sun above and half the Sun below the horizon—on the grid. The day after May 30th (Monday, May 31), and the day before July 12 (Sunday, July 11) will also give you Manhattanhenge moments, but instead you will see the entire ball of the Sun on the horizon—on the grid. My personal preference is the half-Sun.
To find out recommended times and locations around Manhattan to view this ”unique urban phenomenon,” read Tyson’s full post on the Hayden Planetarium blog.
Wednesday, April 28 12:04 pm
A wafer-thin titanium disk — conceived in the labs on the sixth floor of the Museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space — will launch into space in 2014 with the James Webb Space Telescope. This disk, known as a non-redundant mask, will dramatically improve the telescope’s resolution and contrast by filtering light coming from very bright objects.
“This technique was invented for radio astronomy in the 1950s and revived for ground-based astronomy in the late 1990s,” says Anand Sivaramakrishnan, chief instrumentation scientist in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics. “But this is the first time it will be used in space.”
Sivaramakrishnan’s team span the Museum, University of Sydney, Cornell University, University of Montreal, Subaru Telescope, Space Telescope Science Institute, and City University of New York. They have designed non-redundant masks for ground-based spectrographs on the 200-inch telescope at Palomar and the 8 meter Gemini telescope. On the ground, the mask enables the imaging of objects about 100 times fainter than a bright star. But in space, this same tool should be able to detect objects 10,000 times fainter than the nearby bright object or star, helping the Hubble’s sucessor directly image extrasolar planets.
Read more in the official press release.
Wednesday, March 24 3:46 pm
The Expanding Universe, a spectacular new seven-minute video produced by the American Museum of Natural History for the AstroBulletin, investigates one of the major mysteries confronting astrophysicists today: why is the universe expanding at a steadily increasing rate? When astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding in 1929, scientists assumed that the gravitational attraction between galaxies would slow the expansion rate of the universe. But in 1998, two teams of scientists discovered that the expansion rate was not slowing down but was, in fact, accelerating. Could the mysterious “dark energy” be responsible, or perhaps some aspect of gravity we have yet to understand? The Expanding Universe interviews two leading scientists, Alex Filippenko, of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California’s Lick Observatory, and Josh Frieman, of the theoretical astrophysics group at Fermilab, to untangle this cosmic mystery.
Click to view ‘The Expanding Universe’
The Expanding Universe is just the latest feature produced for the AstroBulletin, a large high-definition screen in the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space where visitors can see the latest discoveries in astrophysics. AMNH scientists collaborated with a group of Museum video producers, computer designers, writers, and educators to produce The Expanding Universe, which is presented as part of a year-long Museum celebration commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Rose Center and marking the 75th anniversary of the opening of the original Hayden Planetarium. The AstroBulletin is one of four award-winning Science Bulletin video productions—visually stunning updates on the latest in astrophysics, Earth sciences, biodiversity, and human biology—displayed on high-definition screens in four permanent halls in the Museum. Additionally, Science Bulletins are available online.
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