American Museum of Natural History Research Library
author: American Museum of Natural History

Hayden Planetarium. Astronomia (Gallery); Astronomia
birth: 1964
death: 1997
Permanent exhibition. Opened June 29, 1964 and closed January 5, 1997. Located on Floor 2, Section 18. The Hayden Planetarium's Astronomia exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, also known as the IBM Wing, focused on the history of astronomy and exhibited early astronomical and navigation instruments. The gallery initially featured loans of objects and manuscripts from the Adler Planetarium, Harvard College, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress (1, 1963/64 p. 4, 25-26; 1, 1997) and by the 1990s, the gallery is described as "a variety of astronomical lore with pictures and writings from medieval times to the present." Exhibits also demonstrated how astronomers measure the distance of stars and how a planet's distance from the sun affects its orbit around the sun. Although the exhibit Your Weight on Other Worlds moved around the Planetarium, Astronomia at one point featured these scales (3, 1990; 4, 1984, p. 63).
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