NEW EXHIBIT + ACTIVITIES
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step onto the Moon. Celebrate and learn about the early years of lunar exploration fraught with failures as well as exciting discoveries in the museum’s newest exhibit, Many Inspired Steps: Salute to Apollo 11 and Lunar Exploration, which features a Moon rock collected from the Apollo 17 mission, on loan from the Rhode Island State Archives.
Museum summer hours: daily from 9:30 AM-3:30 PM.
To enhance your experience of the new exhibit, join the museum’s education staff for Moontastic Thursdays – hands-on activities from 1-2 PM in July and August (free with museum admission). Do you know how big the Moon is? Or how far away it is? What happens to the rest of the Moon when we see just a sliver of it, or when we can’t see it at all? What would you need to bring on a visit to the Moon? Discover the answers to these questions and more.
DAILY PLANETARIUM SHOWS
Enjoy a rotating selection of planetarium shows daily at 2 PM in July and August:
Monday through Wednesday: Sky Views Planetarium Show
Explore the night sky. Take a tour of the skies and discover the constellations, planets, nebulae and other stunning night sky objects that can be seen in the night sky. Video imagery will bring viewers up close to black holes, star-forming nebulae and more, showing discoveries in astrophysics while instilling a sense of wonder about our universe.
Thursday and Friday: Solar System Oasis Fulldome Show
Take a voyage through the Solar System in search of water, the key ingredient to life on Earth. The program is followed by a brief tour of the night sky, using the planetarium’s Zeiss star projector.
Saturdays and Sundays: Cosmic Collisions Planetarium Show
Take a thrilling trip through space and time–well beyond the calm face of the night sky–to explore cosmic collisions, hypersonic impacts that drive the dynamic and continuing evolution of the universe. This show explores the full range of space collisions, past, present, and future. Show produced by the American Museum of Natural History.
Cost: Planetarium admission is $3 per person, which includes admission to the Museum. (Please note: Entry to the planetarium is not permitted once the show has begun. Children under age 4 are not permitted in the planetarium.)
APOLLO 11 ANNIVERSARY LAUNCH PARTY
Tuesday, July 16 from 7-10 PM at the Temple to Music
Blast off with the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium and the Roger Williams Park Conservancy to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts on their historic trip to the moon. Celebration begins with building and launching stomp rockets. At sunset (8:20pm) the new Apollo 11 movie begins. Apollo 11 takes us inside NASA’s most celebrated mission—the one that first put humans on the Moon, and forever made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into household names. Crafted from a newly discovered trove of footage and uncatalogued audio recordings, the film immerses viewers in the perspectives of the astronauts, the team in Mission Control, and the millions of spectators on the ground. It launches us to those momentous days and hours in 1969 when humankind took a giant leap into the future.
Event sponsored by the NASA RI Space Grant Program. Film screening presented with the Providence Children’s Film Festival and Cricket Cinema.
