/PRNewswire/ -- Tellus Science Museum's digital planetarium surpassed 100,000 visitors on Monday, Dec. 14, 2010, capping off an incredible first year for the museum.
"For a planetarium our size, we are seeing three times the normal attendance of most planetariums attached to science museums," said Tellus Astronomy Program Manager David Dundee.
The Tellus planetarium seats 120 visitors and offers four different shows running multiple times throughout each day. The shows are an immersive experience, with topics ranging from the history of space travel, the sun, an animated children's show, and a very popular Christmas show running through the Holidays.
"Our audiences have really been amazed by the universe we can unveil with our digital planetarium," Dundee said. "Our Christmas shows end frequently with standing ovations from our audiences."
The 100,000th visitor was Bret Jones, 7, who came to the museum with his mom and grandparents.
"I was shocked," said Charles Watterson, Bret's grandfather. "I didn't expect this. We drove by the museum on the way to our daughter's house and wanted to come back."
The planetarium is only one part of the Tellus experience. The museum boasts four galleries: Weinman Mineral Gallery, Fossil Gallery, Science in Motion and Collins Family My Big Backyard. Tellus has seen more than 188,000 visitors in its first year of operation.
"I am thrilled that the planetarium has proven to be such a popular venue at Tellus," said museum director, Jose Santamaria. "Every other person who visits the museum also takes in a planetarium show."
New shows premiere in the planetarium every few months, assuring that visitors who think they have seen it all at Tellus have only scratched the surface of what the museum has to offer.
"Often we will see the same families returning over and over for all of our new programs. We have many visitors who come monthly to the planetarium to see our Live Sky tour programs. Some visitors will even go to two or three different shows in one museum visit," Dundee said. "It really is gratifying to have such a positive reaction from our patrons."
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Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The Other Eiffel Tower
After 120 years, the famous landmark's original design gets another look
For pictures of its other look:
http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2009/090818_eiffel.html
By Jason Bardi
Inside Science News Service
A new engineering analysis of the Eiffel Tower in Paris shows what the famous landmark would have looked like if its builder had constructed the tower to take into account more realistic wind profiles.
The design was revolutionary 120 years ago, incorporating engineer Gustave Eiffel's newly patented methods for constructing freestanding structures of great height. His method eliminated the need for diagonal truss elements to resist the bending due to an oncoming wind.
The Eiffel Tower was to be his masterpiece -- a testament to engineering progress and the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition held in Paris on the centennial of the French Revolution. Eiffel wanted to make sure that the thousands of tons of iron used to erect the tower would never collapse in a strong wind.
Like all scientists and engineers of his generation, Eiffel did not completely understand the physics of turbulent wind flow over rough landscapes like urban Paris. Because of this, he did not properly model the wind shear his tower might experience in a strong storm.
By the time construction on the 1,000-foot-tall tower began in 1887, Eiffel had introduced more liberal factors for safety. In order to err on the side of caution, his final design made the tower wider on its lower half than originally intended. The fact that the tower remains intact over the past 120 years is testament to his insight to include substantial factors of safety.
P. D. Weidman, a mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado, Boulder was the first to find the mathematical equation for the skyline shape of the tower according to Eiffel’s patented method of construction. A few years ago, he showed that the shape of the tower is exponential when one assumes, as did Eiffel, that the oncoming wind is uniform with height.
In a paper published last month in Physics of Fluids, Weidman shows what the skyline tower profile would be if it were designed and constructed for a realistic "turbulent boundary-layer" wind profile over Paris. The breakthroughs that allowed engineers to model realistic wind profiles were not discovered until after 1908 -- two decades after the tower was completed.
The end result is that the tower for a realistic atmospheric wind would be wider and have less curvature than the existing tower. According to Weidman, the existing tower is "far more elegant" than the tower designed specifically for a turbulent wind.
The attractive thing about this study, said Jim Brasseur, a Pennsylvania State University professor who was not involved in the research, is that it combines history, architecture, fluid dynamics and beauty. "What more can you ask for?" he asked.
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For pictures of its other look:
http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2009/090818_eiffel.html
By Jason Bardi
Inside Science News Service
A new engineering analysis of the Eiffel Tower in Paris shows what the famous landmark would have looked like if its builder had constructed the tower to take into account more realistic wind profiles.
The design was revolutionary 120 years ago, incorporating engineer Gustave Eiffel's newly patented methods for constructing freestanding structures of great height. His method eliminated the need for diagonal truss elements to resist the bending due to an oncoming wind.
The Eiffel Tower was to be his masterpiece -- a testament to engineering progress and the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition held in Paris on the centennial of the French Revolution. Eiffel wanted to make sure that the thousands of tons of iron used to erect the tower would never collapse in a strong wind.
Like all scientists and engineers of his generation, Eiffel did not completely understand the physics of turbulent wind flow over rough landscapes like urban Paris. Because of this, he did not properly model the wind shear his tower might experience in a strong storm.
By the time construction on the 1,000-foot-tall tower began in 1887, Eiffel had introduced more liberal factors for safety. In order to err on the side of caution, his final design made the tower wider on its lower half than originally intended. The fact that the tower remains intact over the past 120 years is testament to his insight to include substantial factors of safety.
P. D. Weidman, a mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado, Boulder was the first to find the mathematical equation for the skyline shape of the tower according to Eiffel’s patented method of construction. A few years ago, he showed that the shape of the tower is exponential when one assumes, as did Eiffel, that the oncoming wind is uniform with height.
In a paper published last month in Physics of Fluids, Weidman shows what the skyline tower profile would be if it were designed and constructed for a realistic "turbulent boundary-layer" wind profile over Paris. The breakthroughs that allowed engineers to model realistic wind profiles were not discovered until after 1908 -- two decades after the tower was completed.
The end result is that the tower for a realistic atmospheric wind would be wider and have less curvature than the existing tower. According to Weidman, the existing tower is "far more elegant" than the tower designed specifically for a turbulent wind.
The attractive thing about this study, said Jim Brasseur, a Pennsylvania State University professor who was not involved in the research, is that it combines history, architecture, fluid dynamics and beauty. "What more can you ask for?" he asked.
---
Community News You Can Use
Follow us on Twitter: @gafrontpage
www.FayetteFrontPage.com
www.GeorgiaFrontPage.com
www.PoliticalPotluck.com
www.ArtsAcrossGeorgia.com
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