NEW YORK -- If you’re one of those parents who steals 40 winks while the kids catch the constellations, you may have to look for another place to nap. You won’t want to miss a moment of the show at the new Hayden Planetarium.
The updated Space Theater, part of the new $210 million Rose Center for Earth and Space opening 19 February, uses impressive architecture to tell the story of a tiny human race in an unimaginably expansive universe.
Architect James Stewart Polshek calls the dazzling new wing of the American Museum of Natural History a "cosmic cathedral." The 120-foot cube of a building uses the clearest glass available anywhere -- nearly an acre’s worth of material called Pilkington water white -- to envelop the 87-foot, 2,000-ton sphere of the Hayden Planetarium.
"We’ve got a lot of universe to fit into this building," said astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium.
The Rose Center's shining star is its 429-seat Space Theater. Passport to the Universe, the inaugural show narrated by Tom Hanks, begins with an imaginary lift-off from planet Earth. The seats rumble, thanks to the theater's state-of-the-art spatial sound system. Visitors see the familiar night sky, with the help of a Zeiss Mark IX projector. Built to the museum’s specifications, the Zeiss projects 9,100 randomly twinkling stars, as well as the sun and planets in our solar system.
The familiar sky disappears as a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 InfiniteReality2 -- a supercomputer with the power of 200 desktop PCs -- transports the audience beyond the Milky Way.
The realistic flyby of the Orion Nebula, a look at the Virgo Supercluster, and a voyage through 50,000 neighboring galaxies are based on research, data, and images from NASA, the Hubble Telescope, and the National Science Foundation.
Images of galaxy clusters that form a three-dimensional network called "the large-scale structure of the universe," are drawn from a database of 45,000 galaxies developed by R. Brent Tully, professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii. The only imaginary rendering in the show is that of the black hole, the plot device that delivers the audience back to Earth.
Another new exhibit, "Scales of the Universe," installed on a balcony surrounding the sphere, compares the smallest objects in the cosmos to the largest. At one stop on the scale, the sphere represents the supergiant star Rigel in the constellation Orion while the a ball, small enough to fit into two cupped hands, represents the Sun of our own solar system. Farther along in the exhibit, the sphere represents an atom while another tiny ball represents a proton.
The "Cosmic Pathway" exhibit, which winds around the outside of the sphere, displays a timeline of the emerging universe, starting with the Big Bang 13 billion years ago. Artifacts like presolar grains extracted from a meteorite and the fossilized tooth of a dinosaur line the display, together with 220 astronomical images that illustrate red shift, which uses light to measure the distance between the objects.
The average footstep along the walkway represents 50 million years. And the entire course of human history fits in the width of a hair on the 360-foot path.
