vip in the city

Good bye, Pluto. Hello, Kryptonite.

Back at the apartment, I had a run-in with the super, and as a result, the work I had arranged to have done in the apartment this afternoon got postponed to tomorrow morning. So I guess I won’t be going back to the office until Thursday. Gotta love co-op living.

B, RS and JS were planning a trip into Manhattan, and joining them on their continuing tour of New York seemed vastly preferable to sitting at home sulking over my own thwarted plans. We met at the movie theatre and headed uptown to The American Museum of Natural History. (We were about to to hit the MoMA, until SYB reminded us that the museum is closed on Tuesdays. Good looking out!)

We entered the Rose Center for Earth and Space first, recalling to mind that the last time I set foot inside, a year and a half ago, it was 4:00AM on a pitch black and icy, mid-January morning. SYB, B and I (and a couple hundred other hardy/crazy souls) had made the trek there to witness the live feed of the Huygens spacecraft touching down on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons. When those first black, white and flaming orange grainy images started flitting across the screens before our bleary eyes, it was a sight to behold. The excitement at the Center was palpable, and well worth losing the few hours sleep.

Today, at a far more reasonable hour, we zipped among the fleets of Maclarens through the spiral walkway with the timeline of the universe (Big Bang to present): 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in ten minutes! I always liked the Scales of the Universe upper walkway feature, offering size comparisons ranging from the known universe to subatomic particles by using the 87-foot Hayden Sphere in the center as a reference.

As for the scaled model of the solar system inside: there is no Pluto. Never was, from the time the Center opened in 2000. A display for the model notes that “Beyond the outer planets is the Kuiper Belt of comets, a disk of small, icy worlds including Pluto.” A controversal concept at the time, now widely accepted.

No field trip to the Museum is complete without checking out the dinosaurs:

And while we were there…

We were out of there in record time, opting for a leisurely dinner of New York pizzas with the visitors before the IMAX screening of Superman Returns… in 3-D! We were handed giant plastic glasses at the door to don for four film sequences (and the trailers, which were also projected in 3-D.) Actually, though, it was three film sequences and an approximately ten second long clip of the Man of Steel flying around just before the closing credits rolled. Still, pretty cool!

There's 1 comment so far ... Good bye, Pluto. Hello, Kryptonite.

Qsoz
September 1, 2006

Going to the AMNH tomorrow morning to fold safari animals for their Christmas tree. Huzzah!

Go for it ...