It’s Throwback Thursday and today we are going all the way back to 2009 to discuss a scientific fail. Galileo Galilei is famous for his astronomical observations and discoveries, but he could have been famous for one more thing! He was technically the first astronomer to observe Neptune while studying Jupiter’s moons in 1612 and […]
Jupiter is now high in the east-southeast at dusk. It outshines all stars we ever see at night, so you can’t miss it. Mercury is visible just after sunset this month. Face west at twilight, and look low in the sky over the point where the sun sets. Mercury isn’t as brilliant as Venus or […]
The Burke Baker Planetarium and Friedkin Theater renovation project reached a milestone this week, and we at the museum are brimming with anticipation! Okay. That’s an understatement. When we first heard the news, we all ran around screaming, “The dome is finished! The dome is finished!” That’s what really happened. The dome is indeed complete, […]
In July of 1964, the Houston Museum of Natural Science opened its new museum in Hermann Park with modest exhibit space and the Burke Baker Planetarium. A state-of-the-art Spitz Space Transit Planetarium dominated the theater’s center with its flat floor and a few slide projectors. Two star balls connected by cages, swinging in a yoke, […]
A rousing game of “Will it Float?” occasionally played on The Late Show with David Letterman was really just an impressively popular density guessing game. In our recently added Science Start Outreach Program, Discovering Density, we play a similar game, predicting and testing to see what happens when you toss things into a tank of […]
