INTERACTIVE, GRAPHIC AND AUDIOVISUAL HIGHLIGHTS

• Mechanical graphic: "Night Sky Projection" – Visitors enter gallery beneath an overhead projection of the moving night sky as seen from the Northern Hemisphere.
• Mechanical interactive: "Astrolabe and Quadrant" – Visitors experience how early astronomers worked by using detailed replicas of an astrolabe and a quadrant to sight a star on a nearby wall.

• Mechanical interactive: "Refracting Telescopes" – Visitors can sight Earth’s Moon through a detailed replica of a primitive Galilean telescope and compare it to the same image seen through a small, modern telescope.
• Mechanical interactive: "Lenses and Mirrors" – By directing a light beam through four configurations of lenses and mirrors, visitors compare how different types of telescopes function.
• Touchable interactive: "Light Path" – Visitors with impaired vision trace the light path through reflecting and refracting telescopes.

• Graphic: "Observatory Dome" – This entire section is housed within a re-creation of an observatory dome showcasing the observing cage from Mount Wilson (Calif.).
• Mechanical Interactive: "Blink Comparator" – This instrument shifts between two images of the same area of the night sky taken at different times, allowing visitors to see minute changes in a variable star.

Fourth Section—Exploring the Universe with Spectroscopy

• Graphic: A large, 3-D rendering of the mind’s eye of the astronomer of the 1950s, showing galaxies moving away from each other above a typical drive-in movie scene in the Southwest United States.
• Mechanical Interactive: "Guess the Gas" – Using a spectrometer, visitors examine the light produced by four different elements and compare the different patterns of spectral lines that those substances produce.
• Mechanical Interactive: "Doppler Shift" – Visitors manipulate a mechanical representation of a galaxy and watch its visible characteristics change, showing that, like sound, the light from an object moving toward or away from us shifts in wavelengths.
  

Fifth Section—Exploring the Universe in the Digital Age

• Graphic: "The Electromagnetic Spectrum in Stained Glass" – a large stained-glass work showing the range of light that shines on Earth and how deeply it penetrates the atmosphere.
  
• Graphic: A series of rings on gallery carpeting represents the actual sizes of mirrors from key telescopes, ranging from the 2.4-meter mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope to the 10-meter mirror of the Keck telescopes (Hawaii), the world’s largest.
• Mechanical interactive: "Infrared Camera" – Although the human eye only detects the narrow range of visible light, a camera and monitor show that visitors radiate a different light in the form of body heat.
• Mechanical interactive: "Birthday Star" – Visitors provide their birth years and are introduced to stars an equal number of light years away. Highlights in astronomical history for birth years are also displayed.
• Mechanical interactive: "Electromagnetic Spectrum as Piano Keyboard" – eight playable electronic keys teach visitors that visible light would equal a single octave on a keyboard while the detectable range of the electromagnetic spectrum would equal more than 65 octaves or approximately nine keyboards laid end to end.
• Video interactive: "Museum Roadshow" – Mysterious-looking (astronomical) instruments get professional appraisal in this spoof of a popular public television program.
• Video: "The Travels of Priscilla the Proton" – A computer-generated adventure that follows Priscilla from the time of the Big Bang to her current state in a glass of water.
• Video: "Scott Hamilton Skates the Universe" – Olympic gold medalist and national champion Scott Hamilton explores the cosmic rink to Eric Idle’s "Galaxy Song," from the 1983 Monty Python film "The Meaning of Life."
• Mechanical interactive: "Expanding Space" – Superimposing a transparency of galaxies over a slightly reduced image of the same galaxies, visitors turn a handwheel and see how any point in the universe can appear to be its own center of expansion.
• Mechanical interactive: "Elastic Space" – An elastic construction representing the universe. As visitors turn the handwheel to stretch the fabric, the galaxies move apart from each other but they themselves do not expand.
• Mechanical interactive: "Gravitational Lens Effect" – By looking at an image through a special lens, visitors see how the gravity of one galaxy cluster can bend the light path of another.
• Video projection: A rotating, 3-D map of the large-scale structure of the universe, with a dot representing each galaxy, incorporates the latest data as it becomes available.
• Computer interactives: three computer stations at the end of the gallery explore current observing activities and include a "Test Your Knowledge" program.
  

Beyond the Gallery

• An Explore the Universe Web site (airandspace.si.edu/exploretheuniverse) presents images, text and interactive activities that reside in the exhibition gallery. It includes a virtual tour of the gallery, an online lesson section and links to scientific and academic resources.

Explore the Universe Media Kit:
Explore The Universe Press Release - September 13, 2001
Explore The Universe Curator's Top 12 Artifacts
Explore The Universe Interactive, Graphic and Audiovisual Highlights
Explore The Universe Bios
Explore The Universe Quick Facts
Explore The Universe Fun Facts
Explore The Universe Imagery for Press Use
Online Exhibition: http://airandspace.si.edu/exploretheuniverse

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