Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Osaka Science Museum

Sorry - I cheated with this pic.
What you can see is the impressive building of the Osaka Science Museum. I didn't take this picture because when I arrived, it was bucketing down and I didn't want to get my camera wet. Also, you were not allowed to take pics inside the museum.
The reason I went to the museum is that it has a planetarium, and I heard that the Japanese optics for the planetarium machines are fantastic.
Well, they certainly didn't disappoint, and they also had a show on exoplanets.
Exoplanets, for those not familiar with the term, is the name applied to planets around other stars outside of our solar system. At the time of writing, there have been 761 confirmed exoplanets discovered, with(the number increases daily at the moment as data from the NASA Kepler mission is being analysed.
Most of the planets so far discovered, must be very hostile environments for life, and this show used - yes you guesed it - arttist's impressions - to show these worlds.
The whole show was in Japanese, but i knew enough about astornomy to understand from the context. I even recognised the Japanese pronunciation of some of the stars.
It was also weird seeing the night sky in the planetarium from the view of Osakans. The sky looked completely upside down to me, but then I am in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment.
The exhibits at the Science museum were terrific and covered a huge range of topics. I was surprised at the depth of some of the coverage on topics such as neutrino experiments, space-time curvature and the Oort cloud (check Wikipedia if you don't know what I'm talking about!), but they still had those fantastically engaging interactive exhibits that were exciting the children, not to mention, quite a few of adults as well.

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